Accountability at Harvard

It has not been an easy year for Harvard’s governing boards.

Harvard Corporation member Herbert S. “Pug” Winokur ’64-’65 will step down later this month due to his involvement with Enron’s catastrophic collapse last year. Winokur’s credibility to serve on the Harvard Corporation, which is responsible for overseeing the best interests of the University and its students, was fatally compromised by his membership on Enron’s board of directors and his position as the chair of Enron’s finance committee, which directly approved one of the questionable partnerships that led to the corporation’s implosion.

The Harvard Overseers have had controversy of their own. Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, whose term as an Overseer will end later this month, admitted that she failed to attribute information in her books to several source materials, most notably Lynne McTaggart’s Kathleen Kennedy: Her Life and Times. Sentences from McTaggart’s book were reproduced almost verbatim, without attribution in Goodwin’s The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys. The plagiarism was serious enough to prompt publisher Simon & Schuster to destroy all remaining copies of the book in lieu of the publication of a revised, corrected version. Most disturbingly, Goodwin has admitted that she borrowed from several other sources on other occasions. This as a disappointing mistake from a Harvard overseer; Goodwin is a leader of the University’s academic community, the foundation of which is integrity in scholarship.

Winokur and Goodwin remind us that Harvard’s leaders are human beings; they are fallible, and it makes little sense to grant them absolute power over a University endowed with some of the best minds in the world.

The Overseers are elected by the University’s alumni, but their authority is limited—they rubberstamp the most important decisions made by the Harvard Corporation. When the Overseers confirmed Lawrence H. Summers as the University’s next leader, they were notified only days before the vote—giving them hardly any chance to scrutinize the candidate. The all-powerful and extremely secretive Harvard Corporation chooses its own members—making it accountable only to itself.

The Overseers have a narrow constituency and little power; the Corporation has no accountability and immense power. By and large, the Corporation and Overseers are unrepresentative of and unaccountable to the Harvard community. Thus, although the members of the governing boards may be very qualified and dedicated, there is no check on their power when they make mistakes.

An elected Corporation member chosen by a broad University committee would still make mistakes—but such a leader would at least be endowed with the legitimacy and authority conferred by an open selection process where representatives of Harvard’s various constituencies have a formal voice. Harvard need not be a democracy, but basic accountability does not necessarily require a vote. Instead, to increase transparency, names of potential candidates for the Corporation should be released so that students, faculty and staff can express their preferences. Corporation members chosen in this fashion would then be accountable to the University in the broadest sense—not just to a secretive group of Harvard insiders who are not perfect.

Winokur’s resignation from the Corporation and the appointment of Robert E. Rubin ’60 are solid first steps towards improving the University’s most powerful governing board. But until members of the Corporation and the Overseers are chosen in an open, transparent process in which students, faculty and staff have a formal voice, the governing boards will not be representative of and accountable to the Harvard community.