Overseers Face Long Struggle To Establish a Place at Harvard

Until 1865, the entire Massachusetts state senate sat as ex officio members of the Board of Overseers. But since the end of the Civil War, alumni have elected new Board members at Commencement. Charles William Eliot, Class of 1853, who would become president in 1869, at the time called the change a “happy liberation” of the University from state control.

Since then, however, the Overseers’ attempts to assert themselves forcefully in Harvard politics have often faltered, particularly after the Second World War.

When conservatives on the Board tried to block the appointment of economist John Kenneth Galbraith in 1948, for example, University President James Bryant Conant ’14 threatened to resign if the Overseers did not confirm the appointment. As Andrew B. Schlesinger ’70 recounts in his book, “Veritas: Harvard College and the American Experience,” the Overseers promptly backed off.

And when in 1954 Board members complained to Conant’s successor, Nathan M. Pusey ’28, that the Overseers had been marginalized in important governance decisions and appointments, Pusey responded that he would informally seek their advice in the future. But, as Morton and Phyllis Keller note in “Making Harvard Modern: The Rise of America’s University,” “little appeared to change.”

In the 1970s, the Corporation convened every two weeks, sorting through mountains of reports and meeting with the president and other top officials.

Many fellows, the Kellers write, felt overwhelmed by the Corporation’s vast and disorganized administrative processes. Time Inc. Chairman Andrew Heiskell, who had previously served as the Board of Overseers’ president, declared in his second year as a Corporation fellow, “I’m sick and tired of being tossed a bowl of untreated sewage to consider for the next meeting.”

But Derek C. Bok’s presidency, which began in 1971, would bring significant changes to the fellows’ workload. “As both Harvard and its bureaucracy grew,” the Kellers note, “the Corporation became more detached from the mundane realities of University governance.”

Bok’s tenure reshaped the roles of Harvard’s two governing boards through the modernization of the University’s central administration.

“The rise of the professional management means that much of the day-to-day decision-making is in the hands of the bureaucracy,” Morton Keller says, pointing in particular to Bok’s move to increase the number of vice presidents from one to four.

As its role at Harvard evolved, the Corporation held most strongly to its fiduciary powers. The seven-member board, the Kellers write, “came to resemble a company board of directors.”

The president and fellows now meet about once a month.

No overseers sat on the presidential search committee until 1990, when three board members joined the six Corporation fellows. The search resulted in Neil L. Rudenstine’s selection the following year.