Conflicts of Interest

Like the Little Engine That Could, the Faculty Council just kept trying.

This week its seven-month effort to devise a new conflicts-of-interest policy finally paid off, as the council unanimously approved a tough new statement that seems almost certain to secure Faculty approval later this term.

The new policy would replace 15-year-old guidelines that professors increasingly had criticized as unenforceable. It would require professors to report to a new committee any activities that pose potentially serious conflicts.

In another departure from present policy, the proposed guidelines would urge faculty members to guard against "conflicts of commitment"-outside activities that absorb too much of a professor's academic time or energy-in addition to the traditional financial conflicts of interest stressed by existing guidelines.

The statement approved by the council also includes the first formal acknowledgment of a "one-day-a-week" rule governing outside activities that has existed as University common law for many years. Under that guideline, Harvard expects full-time faculty members to spend an average of no more than 20 per cent of their working hours on outside activities.

The proposed committee, which Dean Rosovsky would chair, would advise professors on whether they could maintain potentially unacceptable conflicts. The new unit would not aggressively seek out professors who may be violating the Faculty's guidelines, nor would it make public information tendered by professors.

But council members said this week they expect professors to inform the committee of any dubious outside activities and predicted that Faculty members would comply with the body's recommendations.

Several professors, informed of the likely change in policy, have recently told Rosovsky's office of their doings outside of Harvard, Phyllis Keller, associate dean of the Faculty for academic, planning, said this week.

Rosovsky has said that no professors have consulted him about their potential conflicts under the present policy, so those individuals who came forth this week are the first to seek official advice on their outside activities.

Though many council members agreed that disclosure of outside involvements would increase sharply until professors begin to understand the limits to their extracurricular activities, few felt the new committee would be presented with egregious violations of the new guidelines.

The new guidelines say that professors holding positions as executive officers in companies are likely to have unacceptable conflicts with University commitments. Professors in the hard sciences-where involvement with outside companies is most common-estimated this week that no more than a handful of their colleagues presently occupy such posts and agreed that those professors would easily resolve their conflicts.