Harvard Law School Faculty Votes to Establish Faculty Senate Planning Body

Harvard Law School faculty members voted to support the creation of a University-wide faculty senate planning body during a meeting on Thursday.

The resolution to support the planning body passed with 32 faculty members voting in favor, while 22 people voted against and one person abstained. Fifty-six professors voted on the resolution, which represented a 47 percent turnout from the Law School’s 118-member faculty.

Andrew M. Crespo ’05 and Ryan D. Doerfler led the charge in support of sending delegates from the Law School to the planning body. Crespo and Doerfler were both part of the informal 18-member group of professors across the University that began calling for the establishment of a faculty senate in April.

Just last week, the Harvard Kennedy School faculty voted to support the planning body. The Law School joins HKS, the School of Public Health, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the Graduate School of Design, the Divinity School, and the Graduate School of Education in a growing movement to expand faculty say in University governance.

The vote on Thursday leaves the Harvard Medical School and Harvard Business School as the only faculties who have yet to vote on the planning body. So far, no faculty at Harvard has voted against establishing the planning body.

Thursday’s resolution was a simpler version of an earlier resolution, which was amended to “eliminate things that some people thought might be ambiguous,” according to HLS professor Charles R. Nesson ’60. The final resolution was only three sentences long and announced the future election of three delegates from the HLS faculty to the planning body.

The HLS delegates will join representatives from the FAS and each graduate school as part of a planning body that may determine the future of faculty governance at Harvard. The FAS is allotted 12 delegates, while HMS and the Harvard Dental School will share a combined four delegates, and all other schools receive three delegates each.

The vote to support the faculty senate was previously discussed at an HLS faculty town hall in the spring and two meetings earlier this semester.

Crespo said in an interview that the “Law School faculty had a characteristically thoughtful, deliberative, nuanced discussion.”

“I am heartened by the strong vote in support of participating in this important discussion about how best to foster faculty governance at Harvard,” he added.

The resolution does not enumerate any specific powers for the Planning Body, and it notes that the vote “is not an endorsement of any proposal that may be developed by said Planning Body, and that any such endorsement would occur only after being presented to and discussed by the Faculty of Law.”

Crespo said there was no specific timeline outlined for selecting delegates to the planning body but he expects it will happen promptly.

Nesson described the meeting as “one of the best discussions that I’ve experienced in quite a while on the Harvard Law School faculty.”

Despite the majority of faculty voting in support of the planning body, the proposal also had some vocal opponents.

HLS professor Janet E. Halley strongly criticized the resolution in a statement to The Crimson.

“This resolution is silent about the scope of powers it authorizes the Planning Body to bestow on any proposed Senate; we run the risk of seeing a loose-cannon Planning Body,” Halley wrote.

“I have no confidence that any Harvard Faculty Senate would ever substitute for robust faculty expression of views in and through the various faculties and in the public sphere,” she said. “It could become a sleepy village or a dangerous instrumentality.”

Nesson, who voted in favor, said that there was doubt at the meeting about “what this Senate would actually look like and what its powers might actually be.”

“Just a very nuanced question, pluses and minuses on both sides,” he added.

—Staff writer S. Mac Healey can be reached at mac.healey@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @MacHealey.

—Staff writer Saketh Sundar can be reached at saketh.sundar@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @saketh_sundar.