U. Senate Already On the Books

As professors outside the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) call for the creation of a University-wide legislative body, few at Harvard are aware of the fact that such a body already exists—at least on the books.

An obscure provision in the Statutes of Harvard University, posted on a University website, establishes a University Council, composed of “the President, Professors, Associate Professors, and Assistant Professors of the University and such other University officials as the Corporation with the consent of the Overseers may appoint members of the Council.”

According to the Statutes, the University Council serves “to consider questions which concern more than one Faculty, and questions of University policy.”

But longtime Harvard administrators said they had no recollection of the body ever meeting, and many professors said they had never heard of the University Council.

At one point in Harvard history, there was a more active Academic Council that consisted of “all the professors of all the faculties” and served as “an advisory board for appointments,” wrote Samuel Eliot Morison, Class of 1908, the author of “Three Centuries of Harvard: 1636-1936.”

And according to Morison, the Academic Council was used for a time by President Charles W. Eliot, Class of 1853, who led the University from 1869 to 1909.

Though the body has gone through some changes, a shell of the Academic Council still exists today.

A 1997 re-accreditation report lists an Academic Council chaired by the president and including the provost as well as “the deans of the several faculties,” and the Graduate School of Design still lists the Academic Council in its faculty handbook.

But the Academic Council—with just a few top administrators among its members—is a far cry from the representative University-wide body that some professors have been proposing.

BRING BACK THE COUNCIL

The calls for a University senate emerged amid tensions between FAS and Harvard’s outgoing president, Lawrence H. Summers weeks ago.

“I actually personally wish that there were a University senate, which would provide an opportunity for issues generally to be discussed before a more representative body,” the Design School’s dean, Alan A. Altshuler, said in an interview on Feb. 15. “It is perhaps a flaw in the Harvard governing system that there’s no mechanism to find out what the University faculty thinks.”

Frankfurter Professor of Law Alan M. Dershowitz also said in a Feb. 15 interview that he thought there should be “a faculty senate or some institution that reflects the broader faculty and the broader student bodies at Harvard.”

The perception the FAS speaks for the entire University “is a terrible injustice” to professors from Harvard’s other schools, Dershowitz said.

Most professors were unaware that the University Council existed and said that it would have to be adjusted to the times to become an effective legislative body.

“It is certainly possible that Harvard has on the books something that would facilitate a new way of looking at governance issues, and that document ought to be examined or re-examined in light of the 21st century,” said the research director of Harvard’s Center for Public Leadership, Barbara Kellerman.

Harvard is a much larger institution today than it was in President Eliot’s time. With about 9,000 faculty members at the Medical School alone—and an additional 2,500 at Harvard’s other schools—the University Council would have some trouble finding an ample-sized meeting space on campus.

As a result, several professors have proposed a more limited legislative body.

The director of Harvard’s Civil Rights Project, Gary Orfield, who is a professor at the Graduate School of Education, described the University’s current system of governance as “pre-democratic.” He said that Harvard needs “some sort of representative institution,” which would include both faculty members and students from across the University.

“Student representation is seen as so threatening around Harvard, and it is really quite constructive at most places,” Orfield said. “If the instructional program isn’t that good, students need to have a voice.”

Harvard wouldn’t be the first school to establish a University senate—many institutions, including Stanford and Columbia, already have such bodies.

A former member of Stanford’s business faculty, Rajiv Lal, who is now the Roth professor of retailing at Harvard Business School, said that “when FAS had a meeting and a vote of no confidence, there was no process by which the rest of the University could express itself. And I think that’s the thing you want to correct.”

“It should be possible for the University as a whole to express an opinion rather than be limited to the FAS,” Lal said.

But it might not be possible in the near term. As the University prepares to enter a period of transition under Interim President Derek C. Bok, the creation of such a body most likely will have to wait.

Kellerman said that “nothing can or should be, in my view, implemented of major consequence to the governance of the University during the next year or so.”

But, she added, “the next year can be used to think about what system of governance might be appropriate for the 21st century.”

—Staff writer Javier C. Hernandez contributed to the reporting of this story.

—Staff writer Claire M. Guehenno can be reached at guehenno@fas.harvard.edu.