Faculty Apathy Is Disappointing

In 1991, then-dean of the Faculty Henry Rosovsky wrote his last report to the University's governing boards. In it, he lamented faculty members' low participation in the affairs of the University.

"We have every right to assume that a Harvard professor's primary obligation is to the institution--essentially students and colleagues--and that all else is secondary," Rosovsky wrote. Yet he also wrote that faculty were placing other concerns before that "primary obligation" and were no longer honoring their "social contract" with the University.

If the current lack of interest in serving on the Faculty Council is any indication, then Rosovksy's words are as true today as when he wrote them five years ago.

The measure approved at last month's Faculty meeting, which reduces the number of nominations necessary to be placed on the ballot for the Faculty Council, should serve as a warning to all professors about the perils of apathy.

The Faculty Council has 17 members who gather together every other week for approximately two hours. That is not a huge sacrifice to make for the good of the University; if even five percent of the 400 professors in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences were willing to take on that burden for a semester or a year, we would have more than enough people to fill the slots.

But, obviously, we do not, or Dean of the Faculty Jeremy R. Knowles would not have felt the need to reduce the number of nominations necessary from five to three.

Of course, there are some professors who are model faculty-citizens: they serve on committee after committee, draft reports for the Dean and engage themselves in campus debate.

Yet the vast majority of professors hide themselves in their offices, either in noble pursuits such as meeting with students or in grander aims such as corresponding with monthly magazines about their latest piece of prose or arguing with colleagues from another country. While such activities are important (and we are far from proposing that professors spend less time with students), attending Faculty meetings and serving on the Council can help students indirectly and faculty members directly.

If faculty members had kept up with the changes on benefits more closely, the conflict that arose in 1994 over pension caps and retirement plans might not have happened. Going to Faculty meetings and serving on the Faculty Council can help faculty members themselves as well as contribute to the good of the University.

Some faculty members have said the reason for low attendance is not apathy but a lack of time aside from research and teaching; yet people are perfectly able to make time for things that are important to them. Other professors have said that the silence means people are content with the current situation; yet it is hard to believe that bright, opinionated professors agree with everything the University does. And others have said that the deeds of the Faculty just don't seem significant, to which we say: If the decisions of the most distinguished faculty in the world are not significant, then what is?

We urge more faculty members to break out of their cocoons in William James, Littauer, Robinson, Jefferson, Boylston and Warren House. Without the involved participation of many informed faculty members, the Faculty Council will become even more of a rubber stamp for the decisions of a sometimes misguided administration.