It’s Time for Harvard to Regain Shared Governance

In my 55 years at Harvard and 46 engaged in Faculty of Arts and Sciences affairs, I’ve never seen faculty decision-making power as weak as in the past two decades — an alarming phenomenon given that free inquiry and academic freedom depend on shared governance of the University.

Faculty rights have been directly infringed upon. For example, when the Corporation claimed it was not exerting discipline by sanctioning College students who joined unrecognized single-gender organizations, it abrogated the exclusive statutory power granted to the FAS to exert discipline. (The University eventually reversed course following a Supreme Court decision which effectively nullified the Corporation’s action.)

Before concluding that shortcomings of shared governance rest with a detached and occasionally arrogant Corporation or with administrators who — almost without exception — are decent and selfless, we should look to the faculty itself.

In part because FAS faculty meetings have become burdened by predetermined outcomes (someone once quipped to me that top administrators fear nothing more than these meetings’ open question period), FAS meetings have often been ignored by faculty, except by those personally involved in a controversy.

The quorum requirement — repeatedly reduced — is now one-eighth of the membership and sometimes that level of participation is not even reached. I’ve seen faculty members schedule conflicts with FAS meetings, violating the rule that during faculty meetings there is to be “no class meeting, tutorial conference, examination, or other academic activity under the control of this Faculty.”

We can also look to disciplinary processes as proof of waning faculty influence. The Fifth and Eleventh University Statutes vest all disciplinary power in the faculties of Harvard’s various Schools. Over time, the FAS delegated that power, provided for in the Statues, to the respective Administrative Boards. In recent years, the undergraduate Ad Board has frequently had no tenured members save the College’s dean. Thankfully, after discussion among colleagues, two tenured faculty members volunteered to serve on the Board this year.

I’ve advocated that tenured faculty should regularly serve on the Ad Board, perhaps as part of Faculty Council membership, though another mechanism could work. My time on the Ad Board revealed to me several issues and behaviors — such as gender relations, alcohol use, and “impostor syndrome” — that often trouble student life. The time demand of the Ad Board is large, but the FAS or divisional deans could reduce the professor’s duties elsewhere in order to incentivize this important service. Moreover, the role is essential. Every faculty member should have the opportunity — and has the responsibility — to become familiar with the campus experience.

If faculty shy away from their vital governance role — or if that role is denied — the University will drift from vital faculty concerns. If administrators continue to view faculty as consultants to be discounted, faculty members may withdraw further.

Things were not always this way. Until about 20 years ago, I remember campaign goals and budget decisions fostering robust discussion at well-attended, cross-divisional meetings, instead of using input from faculty chopped into departments and focus groups.

In the early 1990s, faculty (and students) across Harvard’s schools played an instrumental role in effectively placing ROTC at Harvard on a new footing. The report they created was taken seriously, with results that set the stage for further actions more than a decade later.

Today, there is an urgent need for professors from all corners of the University to speak to and hear each other once again. Otherwise, there is no plausible sense of the “Faculty” — only a conglomerate of individual faculty members. Faculty divisions might have been engineered in an effort to hear all voices, but this engineering has ensured that it is only administrators who hear all voices.

Faculty are right to push for a University-wide faculty senate. Such a body would embrace all tenured faculty and, as stated in Harvard’s governing rules, consider “questions which concern more than one Faculty, and questions of University Policy.” Impetus to create this senate came from the faculty; no dean or president has, to my knowledge, ever suggested establishing such a body. The time has come.

The Corporation has wrapped itself in shrouds and overridden faculty decisions, most recently denying certain student protestors their degrees after an FAS vote to confer them, only for this decision to be reversed with little explanation weeks later. If it continues to operate in opacity, the current Corporation members may face the fate suffered by the Titans of old: revolt and replacement.

For two decades there have been murmurs, and last year’s leadership crisis understandably increased the murmuring. Amazingly, one FAS divisional dean recently — and publicly — advocated that faculty should not murmur or criticize.

The Corporation may listen more readily — and perhaps more carefully — to mega-rich alumni and donors, but wealth rarely confers wisdom.

I hold little nostalgia for Harvard’s past: more class conscious, less financial aid, a slow and often grudging inclusion of women and other marginalized groups, silent discrimination, and unspoken privilege. There were fewer avenues of intellectual inquiry and less pluralism (though more political diversity). Modern technology has brought blessings (except when we let it reinforce echo chambers or prevent wrestling with long, thoughtful texts). Harvard today is less provincial and more ambitious than when I entered the Yard in 1969.

Yet, if we’re to succeed in shared governance of this large, complex institution in an environment arguably (remember Vietnam?) more challenging than ever, reform is required. We need leadership from every quarter, courageous actions, far greater tolerance for disagreements, deeper cooperation, trust, and goodwill.

It will not be easy, but it is necessary.

James T. Engell ’73 is the Gurney Research Professor of English and Professor of Comparative Literature and a member of the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard.