Final Faculty Meeting To Focus on Relationship Between Administrators and Faculty

At the end of a year marked by several high-profile top-down administrative decisions, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences will dedicate a large portion of its final monthly meeting Tuesday to a broad discussion of its relationship with administrators.

History professor Maya R. Jasanoff ’96, the vice-chair of the Faculty Docket Committee, will lead the docketed discussion, which is expected to touch on consultation, communication, and governance of the University’s flagship faculty.

In a memo addressed to faculty last Friday, Jasanoff pointed to developments in the Harvard library system, Allston, and HarvardX, which have been imposed on faculty in the past year without first receiving their input.

But in recent months faculty members have suggested that list is even longer. From the decision to move the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences to the adjudication of the Government 1310 cheating scandal, and culminating with revelations that administrators authorized secret email searches that violated FAS email privacy policy, faculty members have said that they are being excluded from the University decision-making process in which they have such a large stake.

“Though the FAS holds a monthly meeting of the Faculty, has a Faculty Council that meets twice monthly, and dozens of faculty committees, there has been a sense that the lines of communication between the faculty and the administration are not as effective as they might be, and that existing forums do not provide sufficient opportunity to discuss or respond to issues bearing on the FAS that originate outside or extend beyond it,” Jasanoff wrote in the memo.

Though the discussion Tuesday will be the first by the faculty as a whole, a number of professorial groups have experimented with alternative bodies in the past year. Most recently, faculty organized a town hall-style meeting to discuss changes to the reading and examination periods. Before that, faculty complaints over proposed changes to University rules governing professors’ activities outside of Harvard led administrators to create an online forum for faculty members to share their thoughts and suggestions regarding the proposal.

Jasanoff proposed several discussion questions that faculty might consider about the effectiveness of monthly faculty meetings, the way FAS weighs in on University-wide issues, and on the way that professors raise concerns to administrators. The latter point will likely include an evaluation of the two most-recent experiments.

“We can explore the effectiveness of these experiments and brainstorm other ways to facilitate communication between the faculty and the administration,” Jasanoff wrote.

The discussion is only one of four docketed items on Tuesday’s agenda, though. As is typical at the end of each semester, faculty will also vote on three proposals, wrapping up administrative business before the summer recess. This time around, those votes will include approval of the FAS and University Extension School course catalogs for the 2013-2014 academic year, as well as a proposal to change the way reading and examination periods work. If the new handbook language is approved, Reading Period will be shortened by a day, and all final projects and papers will be due during a renamed and lengthened “Final Examination and Project Period.”

The Faculty Council discussed all three measures at its meeting last week.

—Staff writer Nicholas P. Fandos can be reached at nicholasfandos@college.harvard.edu. Follow him on Twitter @npfandos.