Behind Closed Doors

The Administrative Board is one of Harvard's most enduring mysteries. The reason for this is simple. The Board's business is the welfare of individual students and hence the work of the Board must always be confidential. Members of the Board are not free to discuss the circumstances of individual students save with the students themselves and therefore reports of the Board's work never have the first-hand immediacy of descriptions of Faculty meetings and Undergraduate Council meetings.

There has, nonetheless, been a great deal written about the Board. So much so, in fact, that there is probably little that I can say here which will be new to those who have sought to inform themselves about the Administrative Board. People whose thirst for information about the Board is not sated by reading this essay, and I expect there will be few in that category, might like to look at other publications. The Undergraduate Council has recently distributed a question and answer pamphlet about the Board which is quite useful. Those who would like a more official version of much the same information can consult the relevant section in the Handbook for Students. My annual report of two years ago dealt at length with the assumptions and purposes of the Board and is available in my office. Two more informal sources are a speech given by the Secretary to the Board. Dean [John R.] Marquand, to Freshman Advisers this fall and a description of the Board written by Thomas Crooks, a Special Assistant to the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, appearing in a recent Parents Newsletter. Those with a taste for the arcane might like to thumb through the Senior Tutor's Manual, available in every Senior Tutor's office. One publication which, alas, cannot be made available, because it contains the names of individual students, is a huge tome known as The Precedents of the Administrative Board, which describes every significant case considered by the Board between 1892 and 1970 when the Harvard and Radcliffe Boards merged.

Applying the Rules

An important fact about the Administrative Board to keep in mind at all times is that it seldom makes general policy. Virtually all of its business is composed of considering the circumstances of individual students, either students who seek exceptions to College rules or students who have transgressed College rules. By and large the Board does not make the rules it enforces. The College's rules are voted annually by the Faculty Council and the Faculty, and changes in those rules are proposed to the Faculty by other groups such as CUE, the Core Standing Committee, a little known subcommittee of the Faculty Council--the Committee on the Administration of Educational Policy, the Committee on College Life, and such other committees as the Dean of the Faculty may appoint from time to time to consider particular aspects of the curriculum or College life. It could be argued, of course, that were the Administrative Board to be in the business of making policy as well as applying and interpreting it, that might be a conflict of interest.

The Board does take responsibility through its Subcommittee on General Academic Rules to tinker at the margins, so to speak, of the curriculum. In addition, the Board can bring to the attention of others, usually the Associate Dean of the Faculty for Undergraduate Education, problems it observes, such as implementing the new Quantitative Reasoning Requirement, so that any necessary adjustments can be made. Further, members of the Board are, of course, often asked to express their opinion on various proposed policies under discussion is other groups. But by and large, the Board tries to stay out of the business of making policy and to stick to its responsibility of interpreting policy and granting exceptions.

History

When the Administrative Board was created 90 years ago, there was nothing particularly exceptional about it. Many colleges had created what were, in fact, subcommittees of their faculties to enforce and make exceptions to rules. The Administrative Board did not assume its present distinctive form until 1952. In that year, as a result of something called the Bender Report, it was decided to transfer the responsibility for "deaning" undergraduates from a group of Assistant Deans of the College working in University Hall (often known as baby deans) to the Senior Tutors in the Houses and to make the Senior Tutors members of the Board. That act transformed the Board because the Senior Tutors, along with the Dean of Freshman, immediately became the bulk of the membership of the Board and held the majority of the votes. This change was significant because it placed responsibility for enforcing rules and granting exceptions to them in the hands of a group of people very closely involved with undergraduates. Because Senior Tutors lived in the Houses and usually also taught, they were likely to know the undergraduate members of the House (and the Dean of Freshmen and his assistants freshmen) as well as anyone. Responsibility for the well-being of students was, therefore, placed in the hands of those who lived and worked with students.

Students on the Ad Board

It is often asked why students do not serve on the Board themselves. There are some obvious practical reasons why it might be difficult for students to serve. For example, it takes some time to master the working of the Board. Students might feel that they could not make a significant impact on the Board's discussions until they had served for two or more terms, and given that the Board meets for many hours each week, including several meetings before and after each term, this might seem too great a commitment of time.

Far more important, however, is the fact that in almost every instance the Board holds final responsibility for determining whether a student's petition will be granted or not or whether a student should be disciplined. There is, in contrast to the structure at many other institutions, no mechanism of appeal or reconsideration outside the Board, the rules enforced by the Board, or to which it may grant exceptions--both academic regulations and rules of conduct--have been made by the Faculty. The Faculty has placed in the Board the responsibility to apply the rules as fairly as it can on behalf of the Faculty as a whole. The Board's actions are not reviewed by some other agency or individual. Therefore, individuals serving on the Board accept responsibility for making final determination of a student's status. Board members must weekly come to grips with the fact that it is their responsibility and their responsibility alone to determine whether or not students will be permitted to continue as a degree candidate in the College, whether or not changes in their circumstances which may have profound financial, emotional, or other consequences will be made, whether or not they will receive special help toward achieving educational objectives which may be supremely important to them, and so forth. Few undergraduates, in my experience, when informed of the nature of the Board's work, have wished to assume the responsibility for the well-being of their peers which the Faculty has assigned to its members who comprise the Board. Nor has the Faculty found it proper to ask students to share in the responsibility. Because the Faculty takes responsibility for making the rules, it has always concluded that interpretation and enforcement of the rules should also be its responsibility. All voting members of the Board are, therefore, people of sufficient experience, both in years and in level of educational attainment, to be Faculty members, representing the Faculty as a whole in this essential function.

New Senior Tutors

It might be asked, if students are unlikely to feel effective members of the Board unless they serve for two or more terms, how then do new Senior Tutors succeed as members of the Board? In fact, the transition from a retiring Senior Tutor to a new Senior Tutor usually goes quite smoothly. New Senior Tutors (and new Senior Advisors) are asked to start attending the Board as soon as they are appointed, usually in mid-spring in the previous year. They are also, of course, asked to read all the available literature about the Board. Then the outgoing Senior Tutor usually sits down with a new Senior Tutor and reviews for him or her any of the particularly complex or difficult situations or any students of special concern in the House. Finally, and most importantly, when new Senior Tutors actually begin to present their own cases, often after six months or so of training, other members of the Board, particularly the Chairman and Secretary, make a special effort to see that they do an effective job. The Secretary often counsels new Senior Tutors for several hours before each of their early Board meetings, making certain that they understand all the details of every case they are to present. The Chairman, during the course of a Board meeting, makes certain that new Senior Tutors have an opportunity to present everything that they wish and that all the relevant information is available. The whole Board joins in this effort in order to assure that all students, whether their Senior Tutors are new or experienced, are treated fairly.

Concern for Fairness

This concern for fairness is, of course, central to the Board's work. In the course of every meeting of the Board, questions are often raised about the extent to which equity is being preserved. If the Board seems on the point of granting an exception to a rule, a Senior Tutor may often say. "I don't understand how we can do this. I had a student in very similar circumstances last term and we wouldn't grant the exception. What is different about this case?" That question will produce a careful conversation about the similarities and dissimilarities of the two cases and whether the Board's educational purposes are being achieved or not. Sometimes such a question will cause the Board the trend of a series of decisions and spend some extra time discussing a category of cases to make certain that there is general agreement about how they are being handled.

Plagiarism

Let me give an example. The Board has spent quite a bit of time in the last few years discussing the phenomena of plagiarism and what it calls "misuse of sources." The Board has wanted to be certain that it clearly distinguishes between two different types of situations. There are cases where deception has occurred, that is, where a student has submitted work in a manner such that an instructor in a course might reasonably have assumed that it was the student's own when in fact it was not. In other situations a student has simply failed to follow the rules of citation properly but it is possible to discern what is the student's work and what is the work of others. As a result of these conversations, the Board has sought to make certain that every student in the College has access to all the necessary understandings about citation and the use of sources so that misunderstanding does not occur. It works closely in this effort with the Freshman Dean's Office and the Director of Expositiory Writing because it believes that these issues should be addressed and resolved in the freshman year.

Make-Up Exams

Sometimes the Board's conversations can lead to changes in College rules. Discussions which the Board undertook several years ago about what was then a rapidly rising number of medical make-ups is a case in point. The Board was concerned, as were a number of other Faculty members, about the increasing number of make-ups. It doubted that the number of students coming down with a serious illness during examination period was increasing as rapidly as were the number of make-ups. After discussions with the Faculty Council and CUE, it was decided to place a special notation on every grade recorded on a transcript after an extension of time or make-up granted by the Board. The Board also sought to make certain that all officials in the Health Services who had responsibility for signing medical make-up forms were aware of the significant adverse educational effects which could result from granting such extensions so that he would be able to talk usefully with students requesting extensions. The effect of these deliberations, coupled with other factors the Board cannot measure such as an increasing concern on the part of many students about admission to graduate and professional school, has led to a decline in recent years in the number of make-ups.

Consistency over Years

One of the most remarkable things about the Board is that, in spite of all the changes that have occurred and continue to occur in its structure, and in spite of the changing perceptions of the Board and attitudes toward the appropriateness of exceptions to rules, the enforcement of discipline, etc., the actual work of the Board has remained very consistent over the decades. The Board has always been, from its outset, a group of Faculty members and senior College administrators which strives to understand the circumstances of individual students so as to make, where necessary, those decisions most calculated to help a student to receive a degree from Harvard satisfactorily and efficiently. Only very rarely, and even then only after repeated and convincing evidence of failure, does the Board conclude that a student is best advised to seek completion of his or her College education at another institution.

The College's underlying assumption, on which the Board operates, is as follows. Once a student has been admitted by the Admissions Committee, all of the officers of the College, including the members of the Administrative Board, have a responsibility to seek to assist that student to graduate. Occasionally it is helpful to ask a student to leave the college for a while, if that student is experiencing successive academic failure or difficulty living within the College's rules of behavior. Most often, however, a far more minor adjustment in a student's circumstances is all that is required to guide the student toward successful degree completion. Whether the circumstances be grave or trivial, however, the Board's purpose remains the same--to assist every student who comes before it to obtain and to gain from a Harvard education.

John B. Fox Jr. '99, dean of the College prepared this article last week in response to a list of questions The Crimson submitted to him concerning the Administrative Board. Fax has served as chairman of the Ad Board since 1976 and been a member since 1970.

The Crimson Forum normally appears on Monday.