Listen up

The resignation of University President Lawrence H. Summers has raised a point of contention in the Harvard community: when the University faculty needs to speak, who speaks for it?

Although it is easy for students at the College to adopt the attitude that the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) is the center of Harvard, the truth remains that Harvard is not an institution consisting solely of undergraduates, their professors, and members of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS). Under the existing governing institutions, a single faculty can both too easily be dismissed as an outlier and too easily generalized as representative of the larger University. Last February, when FAS voted “no-confidence” in Summers, confusion ensued. Was this emblematic of widespread discontent throughout the University? More recently, the dearth of support from FAS—presumed by those outside the academy to be representative of all Harvard faculty—prompted Summers’ resignation without any systematic input from faculty of Harvard’s other schools.

Harvard needs to adopt a University senate comprised of faculty from every school that would serve to organize and communicate the greater faculty’s collective voice. As Harvard moves forward with its current initiatives (such as inter-school graduate degree programs and Allston development), a University-wide consultative body will give a common voice to the diverse interests of Harvard’s faculties. The call for a University senate at Harvard was voiced last week by Alan A. Altshuler, dean of the Graduate School of Design. “It is perhaps a flaw in the Harvard governing system that there’s no mechanism to find out what the University faculty thinks,” Altshuler told The Crimson. We agree.

Many other large and notable American universities employ bodies of this type in order to facilitate inter-school communication and cohesiveness. Stanford, Columbia, New York University, the University of Maryland, and the University of Kansas all have representative bodies that cross traditional divisional lines. Harvard too has a provision for a University Council in its faculty handbook, a provision which has collected dust for too long and needs to be activated. For a University that boasts such a distinguished and progressive faculty in all of its schools, Harvard is not living up to its own standard when it refuses to democratize and consolidate the voice of its professoriate.

Some voice concern over the formulation of a representative body of faculty on the grounds that it will encourage an atmosphere of politicking. But if any lesson can be drawn from the events of past weeks, it’s that Harvard is not above politics. Harvard is, however, institutionally impoverished when it comes to facilitating fairness and transparency in its politics. We hope that the formation of a University senate will enrich campus-wide dialogue by facilitating communication amongst the faculties, between the faculties and the administration, and between Harvard and the world outside of the academy. As an organized and institutionalized body, the University senate would serve to mitigate the many competing interests that currently clash.