Ad Board Considers Student Reps

After several years of fighting for student representation on the Administrative Board, the Undergraduate Council might finally be making some headway.

Council President Matthew W. Mahan ’05 and Matthew J. Glazer ’06, chair of the council’s Student Affairs Committee, met with the six members of the executive committee of the Ad Board yesterday to discuss the council’s support for student representation on Harvard’s disciplinary body.

“At the meeting today, I think there was openness on the part of the members of the Board to thinking more about what representative students might bring to the discussion,” Assistant Dean and Secretary to the Ad Board John T. O’Keefe wrote in an e-mail. “But I think there was also a recognition that the voice of the student most directly affected by a particular Board decision is certainly there in the written materials, and sometimes also at the meeting.”

But Mahan said there is still more room for student voice.

“Students can offer a valuable and unique perspective, and their presence alone adds a legitimacy to the board’s proceedings that it doesn’t currently have,” he said.

Currently, only administrators—College deans, senior tutors and a rotating group of professors—sit in on Ad Board proceedings, which determine disciplinary action against students.

Harvard is the only Ivy League school that does not allow student representation at any level of the judicial process. Yale, Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania, Brown and Dartmouth all permit students to sit in on their primary judicial bodies.

At Columbia and Cornell, administrators and faculty deal with routine issues but seek student input in more complicated disciplinary matters and appeals.

On April 12, the council passed a resolution endorsing student representation. The resolution was submitted to the Ad Board’s executive committee.

In the four years O’Keefe has served on the Ad Board, past efforts for student representation on the Ad Board have not moved beyond informal discussion, O’Keefe wrote in an e-mail.

In the past, students have complained that Ad Board procedures misrepresent students and are overly secretive.

Given the already existing student presence on committees involving the curricular review, undergraduate education and Allston, students should be present at Ad Board proceedings, Glazer said.

“[Student representation on the Ad Board] would involve a change in culture, but it would destigmatize the Ad Board,” he said.

But O’Keefe said that yesterday’s discussion involved what student representatives could contribute as permanent representatives on the panel.

He pointed to the required statements written by the student facing disciplinary action, as well as the presence of resident deans who “themselves live among students and so are well informed about student perspectives generally” as sources of student feedback that already exist.

According to Glazer, the executive committee will bring the Council’s concerns before the rest of the Ad Board, adding that the issue would have to go through the new deputy dean whom Dean of the College Benedict H. Gross ’71 will appoint. Gross himself would then make the final decision.

—Staff writer Margaret W. Ho can be reached at mwho@fas.harvard.edu.