Tenured Professors Return to Harvard College Ad Board After 3-Year Dry Spell

Two tenured professors have joined the Harvard College Administrative Board, the disciplinary body for undergraduate students, which clashed with Harvard faculty last semester after it imposed sanctions on student protesters.

The appointments of Philosophy professor Edward J. Hall and Classics professor Kathleen M. Coleman ended a three-year dry spell where the only tenured faculty member to sit on the Ad Board was Harvard College Dean Rakesh Khurana.

They also come amid a push for greater faculty involvement in day-to-day governance, particularly within the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. As the war in Gaza sparked waves of student protest, faculty increasingly tried to assert their role in campus decision-making through public letters and procedural hardball.

FAS Dean Hopi E. Hoekstra has also tried behind the scenes to increase faculty involvement in the Ad Board, encouraging several other professors to consider joining.

An FAS spokesperson confirmed Hoekstra’s outreach to faculty, describing it in a statement as “part of her ongoing work to engage their voices in important community conversations.”

Hall said he first considered joining the Ad Board early last spring after one of his colleagues argued that faculty should be more involved in the “low-level” governance of Harvard via a listserv belonging to the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard.

“It’s easy for people in administrative positions to kind of, over time, lose track of where the faculty are with respect to any given issue,” Hall said.

The Ad Board seemed to lose sight of faculty sentiments when it decided to impose disciplinary measures against 13 seniors who participated in the pro-Palestine encampment, preventing them from graduating.

But the FAS quickly reminded the body who was in charge, voting decisively to let the students graduate regardless. (The Harvard Corporation, Harvard’s highest governing board, overruled the FAS before itself reversing course in July.)

Hall’s and Coleman’s seats will give the FAS an institutional foothold to make sure the Ad Board is executing the faculty’s wishes.

“The Administrative Board is literally the board that administers the rules of the faculty,” former Harvard College Dean Harry R. Lewis ’68 said. “It doesn’t make the rules, it administers the rules.”

Coleman decided in early summer to seek a seat on the Ad Board after Ad Board Secretary Titus Adeleke asked her to join. She said she saw Ad Board service as an important part of University life — one which could “help our community to grow in understanding and maturity” — though it falls outside most professors’ core pursuits of scholarship and teaching.

“These other things that we’re asked to do are usually not the reason why we’ve entered the profession, but we do them as honestly and honorably as we can, and it is our responsibility, I think, to take on tasks that we think we can manage,” she said.

The Ad Board is mostly composed of resident deans — non-ladder faculty who advise students in the undergraduate Houses — as well as administrators and some other non-ladder faculty members.

The body is divided into two committees, one of which oversees disciplinary matters and the other of which evaluates routine student petitions, like adding classes after the enrollment deadline. Both Hall and Coleman sit on the disciplinary committee, which is chaired by Khurana.

Archaeology professor Jason A. Ur received an invitation from Hoekstra to join the Ad Board. He wrote in an emailed statement that he decided not to serve during the 2024-25 academic year due to scheduling conflicts but that he would be open to serving in the future.

Ur characterized Ad Board service as a way to participate in faculty governance — something he saw as particularly important in parts of the FAS that he believes have “moved away from a commitment to academic freedom, including the freedom to express controversial opinions.”

But convincing tenured faculty to join the Ad Board has long been an uphill battle.

In the 1994 Report on the Structure of Harvard College, a faculty and staff committee wrote that the “small number of regular teaching faculty serving as members of the Administrative Board” was a “disturbing trend.”

The committee argued that faculty participation on the Ad Board served three important functions: to bring faculty insights to the board, improve professors’ understanding of student life — and to maintain the legitimacy of the Ad Board itself.

“If it were a body entirely without representation from the teaching faculty, its actions might, with good reason, be more easily questioned by both students and faculty,” the report added.

Lewis, the former College dean, said in an interview that during his time chairing the Ad Board, there were typically two tenured professors — beside himself — in the group. Persuading new members to join, he said, could be difficult.

“It’s actually a lot to ask someone to sit on the board and lose every Tuesday afternoon, or a couple of hours of every Tuesday afternoon, going through a lot of stuff about, ‘Sam got drunk and punched his roommate,’” Lewis said.

“It does not require a professor of Philosophy to sort most of those things out,” he quipped.

Hall, the Philosophy professor, said he was glad there are now at least two tenured faculty serving on the Ad Board again.

“We probably need more,” he said.

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