Faculty Council Meets With Corporation

Six members of the Faculty Council met with two members of the Harvard Corporation yesterday, the second time the two groups have met since the March vote of no confidence in University President Lawrence H. Summers.

Classics Department Chair Richard F. Thomas, who attended the meeting, said that the six Council members would not comment on the meeting because they want to preserve open lines of communication with the Corporation, the University’s highest governing body.

“The members of the Faculty Council had a very good and open meeting with some members of the Corporation. We are pleased to have established lines of communication with them,” he said.

Cabot Professor of Social Ethics and Pforzheimer Professor Mahzarin R. Banaji wrote in an e-mail yesterday that the meeting was productive, although she declined to comment further.

“My colleagues and I were very pleased with the meeting today. Both members of the corporation we met with were wise, listened carefully and left us with the sense that greater transparency and stronger ties to the faculty were their priorities as well,” she wrote.

The Council, FAS’ 18-member governing body, first took the unusual step of requesting a meeting with the Corporation in February, when tensions between Summers and the Faculty were at their peak.

Council members said at the time that they hoped to discuss with the Corporation the sources of Faculty discontent with Summers and to address concerns that the Corporation was deaf to complaints of the Faculty.

“It’s quite perplexing and distressing to read in the media...that the Corporation do not even know that the Faculty are disgruntled or discontent,” Assistant Professor of Sociology Prudence L. Carter, a member of the Council last year, told The Crimson in February.

“There is too much of a disjuncture between the management of the University and the employees of the University,” she said.

Those efforts by the Council culminated in an April 24 meeting with the Corporation. Then, as now, Council members declined to comment on what was discussed at the meeting.

A professor, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said last week that Banaji, Thomas, Anthropology Department Chair Arthur Kleinman, Dunwalke Associate Professor of American History Lisa M. McGirr, Professor of the History of Science Everett I. Mendelsohn, and Harvard College Professor and Phillips Professor of Early American History Laurel Thatcher Ulrich would represent the Council at yesterday’s meeting.

But because he is on sick leave this semester, Mendelsohn did not attend the meeting, Thomas said. Council members declined to say who took Mendelsohn’s seat at the meeting.

Kleinman, McGirr, and Ulrich, as well as Corporation Senior Fellow James R. Houghton ’58, did not return requests for comment yesterday.

A group of department chairs has also met with members of the Corporation twice since the March vote of no confidence—once last April, and once earlier this semester.

—Staff writer William C. Marra can be reached at wmarra@fas.harvard.edu.