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As skepticism of Harvard's governance mounts amid a year of turmoil, a group of prominent Harvard professors is seeking to revive a body that hasn’t existed at Harvard in living memory: a University-wide faculty senate.
Less than 20 years ago, Harvard faculty speaking with a collective voice helped oust a university president. But this proposal marks the first time Harvard's faculties have made a widespread push to unite under one governance body in more than a decade. Reporters Tilly R. Robinson '26 and Neil H. Shah join host Frank S. Zhou '26 to discuss what the move means for Harvard and the future balance of power at the university.
Less than 20 years ago, Harvard faculty speaking with a collective voice helped oust a university president. But this proposal marks the first time Harvard's faculties have made a widespread push to unite under one governance body in more than a decade. Reporters Tilly R. Robinson '26 and Neil H. Shah join host Frank S. Zhou '26 to discuss what the move means for Harvard and the future balance of power at the university.
Creators & Guests
Host
Guest
Guest
Tilly R. Robinson
Faculty of Arts and Sciences Administration Reporter, The Harvard Crimson
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This transcript was generated automatically by https://otter.ai. Its accuracy may vary.
Frank S. Zhou 0:00
This month, a group of 18 Harvard faculty members spanning all nine of the university's faculties sent out one note to hundreds of faculty members and top administrators across Harvard. In it, they propose to revive a body that hasn't existed at Harvard in living memory. The faculty senate. Less than 20 years ago, Harvard faculty speaking with a collective voice were widely credited with helping to oust a university president. But this is the first time a body seeking to represent all of Harvard's faculty has been proposed publicly in nearly a decade. As Harvard continues to navigate a tumultuous year, and some grow increasingly dissatisfied with Harvard's top governance. Harvard's faculty are demanding greater say.
Today on Newstalk, we joined the reporters who broke the news to discuss what this means for Harvard and the future balance of power at the university. From Plympton Street, I'm Frank Zhou. This is Newstalk.
Tilly R. Robinson 0:59
My name is Tilly Robinson.
Neil H. Shah 1:00
And my name is Neil Shah. Together, we cover the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and its administration.
Frank S. Zhou 1:06
Thank you so much, Tilly and Neil for joining us. So tell us what a faculty senate is in the first place and how calls for it first came about.
Neil H. Shah 1:12
A faculty senate is a governing body in which members of the professor can come together and talk about issues of the university at a larger scale than they already do, right, because each of the schools has their own methods for governance, but as of right now, there is no single place where Harvard faculty members can come together and talk about the issues of the day. For those of you who are students listening, think about it, like student government, except now it's the teachers and these teachers have way more powerful of a voice.
Frank S. Zhou 1:39
So tell us about some ways faculty have previously flexed their muscle.
Neil H. Shah 1:42
Back in the early 2000s, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences famously did not like President Larry Summers at the time. And this wasn't even a vote of the full faculty of Harvard. But the Faculty of Arts and Sciences voted no confidence in him. And that is widely attributed to be one of the reasons why Larry Summers ended up having to even step down because newspapers reported that he had started to lose the confidence of Harvard faculty. And think about what might happen when we bring that to a much larger scale, when not just the Faculty of Arts and Sciences but everyone across Harvard meets to express that powerful voice.
Tilly R. Robinson 2:17
But a Harvard faculty senate could also weigh in on more everyday issues. And to get a sense of how this might play out we can look at what's happened at other universities, for instance, at Northwestern University recently, the faculty senate decided to weigh in on proposals to construct a new $800 million football stadium. And what they said is that they were concerned that plans for the stadium and the costs associated with its construction and maintenance could take away from other academic programs. And so they passed a resolution, you know, that didn't codify anything into policy, but that urged the University not to allow the construction of the stadium to detract from its academic offerings. Meanwhile, at the end of March, Columbia's university senate passed a resolution endorsing a policy that would ban audio and video recording of classrooms without permission. And the goal of that some faculty said was to preserve a space for open discussion and academic freedom. Those are concerns that are especially salient at Harvard right now. And also the type of thing that we might see faculty across Harvard schools become concerned with.
Frank S. Zhou 3:15
So tell us why this proposal has come about in this particular moment.
Neil H. Shah 3:20
The Faculty of Arts and Sciences is soon set to meet with members of the Harvard Corporation in a town hall, presumably in which they'll ask some questions about how the university is governed. At the same time, we're at a moment when faculty members at the university broadly have declining confidence in the bodies that govern them. It's interesting at the moment when the corporation is trying to reach out to the faculty for the first time in decades that these faculty want to assert a place for themselves within the governing order.
Tilly R. Robinson 3:48
One thing to note is that some of the faculty who make up this working group have previously expressed discontent with the way the university runs now or the role of faculty in governing it. Philosophy professor Ed Hall told the Crimson that faculty within the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at least have no confidence that the members of the corporation have any understanding of the issues that we deem most urgent, let alone why we deem them urgent. And one of the main pushes in the memo and behind the campaign for faculty senate is the idea that that will build the sort of understanding where the priorities of administrators will be better aligned with the priorities of faculty.
Neil H. Shah 4:24
Faculty members are experiencing a climate at Harvard that for most of them, is something they've never experienced before. And through most of this, the events of the winter where we saw former president Claudine Gay resign and into the spring semester where the news coverage hasn't stopped. They've been in a place where they're mostly powerless to the things that are happening around them. In a one-page document that they attach to their email titled, quote, "Why Harvard Needs a Faculty Senate," the group of 18 faculty members explained that for the first time in generations, Harvard faculty members are, quote, "in regular and intense conversation with one another across schools." And they have a point. As someone who covered a graduate school myself last year at Harvard Law School, I'm used to seeing open letters where a group of Harvard Law School faculty members sign on to take a stand on some issue, sometimes even beyond the scope of their own school. But this year, we have seen a shift in that dynamic, right? We see open letters and petitions, where faculty members from across Harvard schools from Harvard Medical School, Harvard, Kennedy, school, etc, are signing on to these open letters together. So as that conversation is really starting to take shape, these 18 faculty members want to take advantage of that moment, and put these proposals forward to kind of institutionalize that conversation.
Tilly R. Robinson 5:46
I think the other unique thing about this moment is it's a time when Harvard is under a lot of pressure and outside scrutiny, and as such Harvard's central governing bodies are making decisions and making statements to reflect on the entire university. And I think because of that there's heightened attention to what the institution is doing as a whole. But also, because of this moment, I think that Harvard central administration has increasingly been turning to faculty — among other affiliates — to seek their opinions on key issues facing the university, how faculty feel about them, and how to frame the university's response. And they've done that through ad hoc individual consultations. They've also done that through appointing task forces and working groups, such as the Presidential Task Forces to combat antisemitism and to combat anti-Muslim and anti-Arab bias, both of which include faculty from across several departments and schools. And they've also appointed working groups on open inquiry and on what they call institutional voice to determine whether Harvard should adopt a stance of institutional neutrality. All of these are questions that matter to faculty, and questions where the corporation the Board of Overseers in the president's office have increasingly been seeking out faculty input. But taskforces are actually something that comes in for a bit of critique in the memorandum that these faculty have been circulating, because they say that task forces are sort of one-offs, they face start-up and wind-down costs, and it's harder for them to develop actual institutional memory. In fact, the memo repeats a sort of long-standing critique of the faculty's relationship to Harvard central administration, saying that there really aren't clear channels of communication, and that faculty voices are not heard enough.
Frank S. Zhou 7:15
So we know that this letter offered up a number of critiques and positions itself as a potential conduit towards a solution, what would a faculty senate actually do and have the power to do?
Neil H. Shah 7:25
So what these professors are saying in their memorandum to their colleagues is that a Faculty Senate would give them a path of communication to the administration, it would give them a way to speak as a faculty to Harvard central administration, which historically has made all of the important decisions. So creating this kind of a forum where faculty members can come together and express that kind of together voice really gives them a lot of power, because when the people who effectively make the university known for what it is the teaching and the research, express discontent or suggestions, one might expect that the central administration would have to listen.
Tilly R. Robinson 8:05
One thing that's also included in the memorandum are excerpts from two documents released by the American Association of University Professors, one in 1996, on government of colleges and universities, and one in 1994, on the relationship of faculty governance to academic freedom. And what these documents basically argue is that faculty are in the best positions to make decisions on academic matters. And they're also the best to make determinations over whether research has value, how hiring processes should work, et cetera. What if those are things that already happened internally to the various schools at Harvard, for instance, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, but especially asked questions around academic freedom, become increasingly pressing university wide issues, I think the faculty feel a greater need to exercise their voice in that respect. And because of that, there's turning to these really foundational documents.
Frank S. Zhou 8:57
And this is hardly the first time calls for Faculty Senate have been made. Tell us what previous calls for some form of collective body representing the faculty have looked like.
Tilly R. Robinson 9:05
There really hasn't been a faculty senate at Harvard in living memory, but there have been several pushes for it. In the wake of the social unrest and social change of the 1960s. A working group met at the university level to consider changes to incorporating student and faculty voice into university governance later on in 2012. Many faculty across Harvard were angry when central administrators decided to close the financial planning group, which offered financial services to faculty at Harvard. And although this was actually a decision approved by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, there was a sense that it was sort of pushed through by central administrators including then Provost Alan M. Garber, who is currently Harvard's president who was a key figure in announcing and rolling out these changes. And so at the time in 2012, a group of faculty led by Germanic languages and literatures professor Peter Burgard started meeting to consider what implementing a Faculty Senate would look like but that group started meeting in the spring and sort of fell apart over the summer. So the push never really went anywhere. Then again, in 2014 and 2015, there was another controversy that sort of rocked the university. And that was when, once again, Harvard central administration decided to roll out a new set of Title Nine and sexual misconduct policies. The problem was those policies created a lot of backlash at the law school and two law professors, Charles Fried and Robert Mnookan, decided to pen an op ed in the Chronicle of Higher Education, arguing among other things that Harvard's administration had become too centralized, and that some decision making power should possibly be vested in a Faculty Senate.
Frank S. Zhou 10:39
So now we have calls for a faculty senate, what stage are these calls at and what's happening next?
Neil H. Shah 10:44
Right now, the faculty are mobilizing, they have this proposed resolution that they've included in this memorandum and they want to bring it before each of the various faculties to get their approval and to select these representatives for this planning body. We've been told that these documents have already been sent over a mailing list that incorporates the full faculty of Harvard Law School. And Professor Andrew Crespo, one of the authors of this memorandum, told me that he's in contact with the dean over how to proceed forward. At the same time University Professor Danielle Allen, who is a member of the FAS, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, has said that this resolution will be brought for a brief discussion at next month's FAS meeting.
Tilly R. Robinson 11:23
The tentative timeline that's included in these documents suggests that they want to have a process formalized for appointing members to this planning body, which will outline in greater detail what a Faculty Senate would actually look like, by May 15. But it's not clear whether that's going to be possible given the timeline for actually taking votes. And given the fact that many of Harvard schools do not have a formalized governing body in the same way that the FAS does.
Neil H. Shah 11:47
And I do want to add that we've spoken to professors who co-wrote this memorandum from Harvard Law School and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, but presumably their efforts to circulate it elsewhere. The group that co-authored this memorandum includes faculty members from all nine of the faculties, so they're probably bringing it to their own.
Frank S. Zhou 12:08
So for all the calls in favor of a Faculty Senate right now, what would be arguments against one?
Neil H. Shah 12:13
The obvious one is participation. Harvard's faculty are not known for participating in their own governance. For instance, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Harvard's largest faculty, regularly invites members to meetings where they vote on the future of the division. These meetings are not well attended till he and I go to all of them to report on them. And we usually see that they're attended by less than 10% of the people who are eligible to do so. So the idea of a Faculty Senate where potentially not everyone participates might not be that appealing. That's one problem that the Senate planning body, if approved, would have to deal with. Another issue is willingness to even run for a faculty senate to be representative, one faculty member told me earlier this week, with the current faculty council that the FAS has, it doesn't take all that much to get elected. Not that many people are interested. And in his words, if you have half a campaign, you have a pretty good shot. And that's another reason why a faculty senate might not do well, because on top of their research and teaching, who knows how many faculty members truly want to take on additional work?
Frank S. Zhou 13:22
The faculty who've signed this memo argue that calls for Faculty Senate have some form of grounding in the university's governing documents themselves, to really break down what it means and what they're precisely pulling from the University's governing documents.
Tilly R. Robinson 13:35
Right. So the working group is saying that Harvard's faculty doesn't actually need any new authority to be able to push this movement through. What they say is that the fourth statute of the university statutes, which is one of two main sets of governing documents that rule Harvard, you could think of it as like the constitution of the university. What they say is that the university statutes delegate authority to what they call a university council consisting essentially of Harvard's entire professor, and that the statutes write that it is the function of the council to consider questions which concern more than one faculty and questions of university policy. So they say that essentially, the faculty, at least nominally already has all the authority they want to claim. The problem is that there's no way for the University Council as constituted to effectively meet because Harvard's faculty is huge, including 1000s of members. That means it would be impossible to get everyone in the same lecture hall to engage in a really good discussion or to effectively vote on pressing timely matters concerning the university. And sort of because of this fact, the University Council as such, hasn't met as far as we can tell, since about 1902 when they voted on proper commencement regalia. So this body has been long dormant, but the authors of the memo are hoping to resurrect it and the way they're hoping to do that and bring authority back to the faculty and practice as well as by law is by delegating some of that authority to an elected faculty senate which can then reference lent the entire university council as it exists in the statutes.
Frank S. Zhou 15:03
So as we follow news about calls for faculty senate into the coming weeks and months, what should we keep in mind here about this particular moment?
Neil H. Shah 15:10
At this moment for the university, faculty members are going to work everyday and teaching their classes in a climate where the school that they teach at is making national headlines almost every day. Through most of this. They've been in a place where they're mostly powerless to the things that are happening around them. It will be interesting to see if proposals like this for a faculty senate end up changing some of that.
Frank S. Zhou 15:37
Thank you so much to Tilly, Neil, for joining us to break down calls for faculty senate and where we might be going next.
Neil H. Shah 15:43
Thanks, Frank. It was great to chat.
Tilly R. Robinson 15:44
Thanks, Frank, for having us on Newstalk.
Raquel Coronell Uribe 15:54
This episode of Newstalk was hosted by Frank s. Zhou. Producers of this episode are Melanie Sanchez, Emily T. Schwartz and Frank S. Zhou. Our multimedia chairs are Julian J. Giordano and Addison Y. Liu. Our associate managing editors are Claire Yuan and Elias J. Schisgall. Our Managing Editor is Miles J. Herszenhorn and our president is J. Sellers Hill. From 14 Plympton Street, this is Newstalk.