Harvard Names Faculty Conflict Consultant

Beginning this spring, students, faculty and employees upset with working conditions or at odds with their colleagues will be able to consult confidentially with an independent faculty intermediary who will help resolve their problems.

The University has named Clowes Research Professor Henry Ehrenreich to the newly created position of University ombudsperson, from which he will provide impartial advice, informally mediate disputes and direct community members to conflict resolution processes already in place.

Ehrenreich will not have authority to impose solutions or order changes to policy. But he will be able to independently gather facts and act as an intermediary between complainants and the University.

His University-wide office will be staffed with a professional conflict resolution expert and overseen by a faculty committee. While it will not replace ombuds offices at a number of Harvard’s schools, Ehrenreich’s will provide a central resource and report back to the administration about general patterns that deserve University-wide response.

According to Provost Steven E. Hyman, the idea of an ombudsperson arose in the wake of the Katz Committee report on labor and wage policy at Harvard issued last year. The idea was to address the “perception that some employees feel they have no ‘safe harbor’ to take concerns,” Hyman wrote in an e-mail.

But as it will be implemented, the office will serve a broader constituency, including students and faculty.

“Where [ombuds] offices exist...they serve the purpose of providing individuals with a confidential place to take concerns about their work or student life, about their co-workers or their managers, or about Harvard policy,” Hyman said.

With the creation of the position, Harvard joins roughly 300 colleges and universities—including the University of Pennsylvania and MIT—with school-wide ombudspeople.

According to Herman W. Hill, former president of the University and College Ombuds Association, the position takes on a wide variety of meanings at these schools.

The modern academic ombuds position had origins during student radical- ism of the 1960s, he said. And at many schools, conflicts involving students remain a primary focus.

Hill, who recently retired as ombudsperson for the University of Ohio, said he dealt with as many as 300 cases a year, about 80 percent of which were conflicts between faculty and students. Disputes about the tenure process also frequently came to his office.

For a university, the ombudsperson can be a cost-effective investment, as it can save the school millions of dollars in legal fees stemming from court battles and lawsuits.

“If I helped avert one lawsuit per year, I felt I was earning my salary,” Hill said.

But for the office to work, Hill said, universities also need to respect its independence and give ombudspeople access to the inner workings of the institution, a condition that administrations sometimes chafe at.

According to Ehrenreich, many of the details of how the Harvard ombuds office will function remain to be worked out.

Students already have a variety of resolution processes open to them and will be first directed to the proper resources within their schools, he said.

The question of whether Ehrenreich will become involved in tenure is a delicate one, he said, and his involvement would not go beyond “procedural issues.”

But at Harvard, where the tenure system is more secretive than at most universities, involvement in even procedural conflicts would be a major step.

Peter Berkowitz, a former assistant professor of government, sued Harvard alleging procedural improprieties in the denial of his tenure in 1997. The case remains unresolved.

Both Hyman and Ehrenreich cite conflicts over authorship of academic papers as an issue well suited to the new ombuds office’s purview. Conflicts often arise, they said, when contributors who are part of large working groups on a scientific project are left off the credits for a paper. After the Medical School ombudsperson noticed this problem several years ago, the school adopted specific policies in this area.

Ehrenreich said he anticipates tackling similar issues on a University-wide basis.

And on the issue of access to records and other information, Ehrenreich said that while he hasn’t discussed the question with administrators, he assumes it won’t be a problem.

“I would imagine that anything that I needed to know in relation to a particular case would be made available to me,” he said.

Ehrenreich said that since he has no previous experience in conflict mediation it will take time to establish the office’s operational scope.

He hopes to have the professional mediator hired and the office open by sometime this spring.

While the ombuds position would turn over from time to time, the professional staffer would serve for a number of years and develop “institutional memory about how discipline and disputes are handled at the University,” he said.

To the staffer’s expertise, Ehrenreich said he would add his own clout and connections as a faculty member.

“By being a faculty member, it gives the office a kind of prestige within the University,” he said. “I can call a faculty member just to try to get the other side of the story.”

Ehrenreich, a physicist in the Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences, jokes that he understands the Faculty of Arts and Sciences—“his solar system”—but is now being asked to understand a whole other galaxy: the full University.

A graduate of Cornell University, Ehrenreich has been a faculty member since 1963, when he became McKay professor of physics. He gave up teaching duties two years ago but remains active as a research professor doing work on the theory of condensed matter.

Ehrenreich served for a decade on the Core Curriculum steering committee and chaired the science subsection for three years.

“The University has been good to me,” he said, “and I’m trying to do my best for the University.”

—Staff writer David H. Gellis can be reached at gellis@fas.harvard.edu.