Corporation Members Consult Prominent Harvard Professors, Move Toward Presidential Search

Harvard is, at long last, moving toward the launch of its 31st presidential search.

Members of the Harvard Corporation, the University’s highest governing body, met on campus with several groups of prominent faculty members last week to discuss the next presidential search process, according to four people who were granted anonymity to discuss private conversations.

The listening sessions included meetings with University Professors, who hold Harvard’s highest faculty appointment, and members of the 2022 faculty advisory group that assisted with the search that ended in former Harvard President Claudine Gay’s selection.

University spokesperson Jonathan L. Swain confirmed the recent conversations about the next presidential search in a statement on Friday.

“As Senior Fellow Penny Pritzker previously indicated, members of the Harvard Corporation are continuing to seek perspectives from members of the Harvard community on a range of issues, including aspects of a future presidential search,” Swain wrote.

The informal conversations signal that the governing boards are finally confronting an essential question that was pushed aside amid a semester of sustained controversy: How should Harvard pick its next president?

Gay resigned on Jan. 2, 2024, after unrelenting criticism of her administration’s handling of campus antisemitism and mounting allegations of plagiarism ended her tenure after just 185 days in office. Besides appointing longtime University Provost Alan M. Garber ’76 to lead Harvard in the interim, the Corporation largely maintained a low profile in the months after the resignation as it sought to escape a media maelstrom.

The only information about the next presidential search came in May, when The Crimson reported that the Corporation convened a subcommittee to review the process — a development that followed criticisms of the last search as opaque, insular, and ultimately unsuccessful.

The Corporation’s first order of search-related business — before it can even begin to think about candidates and finalists — is to finalize the process by which Harvard will conduct the next search.

While there was some debate among the governing boards about whether they should remove Garber’s interim tag, the Corporation appears to be moving toward a proper presidential search despite public support for Garber from several members of the Corporation, including Senior Fellow Penny S. Pritzker ’81.

During a town hall meeting between FAS faculty members and members of the Corporation in April, Pritzker expressed “complete confidence” in Garber.

The support was so firm that one attendee also questioned why Garber was only serving on an interim basis if the Corporation had that much faith in him.

While Pritzker did not rule out the possibility of Garber serving as the University’s permanent president at some point, she said the Corporation would be reluctant to make such a significant appointment without input from a broader group of Harvard affiliates.

“One of the things the Corporation cannot do is appoint the president of Harvard on our own,” Pritzker said.

—Staff writer Tilly R. Robinson can be reached at tilly.robinson@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @tillyrobin.

—Staff writer Neil H. Shah can be reached at neil.shah@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @neilhshah15.