Multi-Tasked

Remember when Drew G. Faust was “installed” as Harvard’s president? There was pomp, circumstance, and lots of old people in black muumuus.

It was all a ruse. No one became president of anything that day, despite all the old crap that Faust managed to accumulate in the course of the ceremony. The Charter of the Harvard Corporation, vintage 1650, is really just a chunk of parchment. The keys to the University—which, I’m told, open nothing but the Mass. Hall liquor cabinet—are barely even symbolic. It’s nice to think that handing over a couple pieces of silver could change history, but that’s clearly never been the case.

Faust only began her presidency on Nov. 1, when she composed her first career-making e-mail: “I am very pleased to announce the creation of a University-wide task force to examine the place of the arts at Harvard.”

At Harvard, the only way to pop a mandarin’s administrative cherry is to appoint a task force.

Early New England lawmakers imported the British practice of chartering committees to shut people up. In a crisis, one need only appoint a task force to study it, then watch the bureaucratic symphony take shape.

Take, for example, the late 1960s, when administrators created a litany of committees to deal with Harvard students prone to occupying campus buildings. There was the Fainsod Committee, which examined Faculty protocols and which created the Committee of Fifteen to contemplate “changes in the governance of the University.” In turn, the Committee of Fifteen begat the Committee on Rights and Responsibilities, to deal with incidents like the April 1969 riots that started all the trouble to begin with. And lest we forget the stillborn President’s Emergency Consultative Committee, which was declared to be literally too big (and heavy) to meet on the second floor of University Hall, which had been damaged by the student occupation. It only ever met once.

All this eventually gave rise to the current array of student-faculty committees, a system so tortuous that one can’t help but be awed into submission by its sheer complexity.

When, a few years back, the Undergraduate Council (UC) decided that students should be able to room with whomever they wanted, regardless of sex, they followed standard operating procedure. One representative wrote up a lengthy proposal and submitted it to the UC’s Student Affairs Committee (SAC). Voted on favorably, it passed to the UC Executive Board for their blessing, then to the full Council for final approval. Then on to University Hall, where someone in the Dean’s Office put it on the agenda for the Committee on House Life (CHL). CHL then created a subcommittee to examine the proposal, which reported back some months later. Finally, it was decided that, for the most part, things needed to be handled by the Freshman Dean’s Office and individual House masters on a case-by-case basis. That this decision was almost verbatim the status quo before anyone did any advocacy hardly diminishes from the sheer majesty of the process that produced it.

Now, the stars seem to be aligning for a new consensus-driven renaissance at Harvard. The Committee on Campus Life (CCL) is soon to spawn a subcommittee on student group funding in the aftermath of the Party Fund fiasco. A joint subcommittee of the CCL and the CHL will soon begin contemplating College-wide alcohol policies for House events.

And yet, the paper-pushers in University Hall are eager to neuter our procedural revolution. Various administrators have proposed that some of the new committees function on the basis of consensus, without formalized voting rights or parliamentary procedure. Perish the thought!

Fortunately, we peons have our cunning UC advocates to defend our bureaucratic birthright. “The Faculty has placed in [UC-appointed committee members] the responsibility for recommending to it policies related to student life and house life, respectively,” declared SAC Chair Michael R. Ragalie ’09 in an e-mail to the UC earlier this week. “Not having voting members and not taking votes masks that responsibility by incentivizing individuals to abscond from their duties in the interest of allowing the ‘consensus’ to move forward.”

Think of the consequences if Robert’s Rules of Order were to be abandoned in favour of willy-nilly consensus building! The very purpose of any committee—to encourage safely contained confrontation—would be undermined completely if the objective suddenly became finding ways to agree about things. Worse still, a lack of vote tallies leaves some room for interpretation—those who rely on committees to make decisions for them might have to decide things for themselves. That would sink the Harvard administration once and for all.

So welcome, President Faust, to Harvard’s inner circle, but task your forces well. A committee is like a delicate exotic fruit: Touch it and the bloom is gone.



Adam Goldenberg ’08 is a social studies concentrator in Winthrop House. He is chair of the College Events Board and a member of the Senior Class Committee. He is a former member of the UC’s Student Affairs Committee, the UC Executive Board, the Committee on House Life, the Standing Committee on the Core, the Harvard-Yale Tailgate Committee, the Advising Programs Office Student Advisory Board, and the Harvard University Dining Services Student Advisory Committee. His column appears on alternate Fridays.