The Chairs Make Their Stand

Christie McDonald’s spring-semester course, French 238, “Failure and Change,” focuses on the Enlightenment and its aftermath. But if Harvard were to offer a course on its own administration, the title might be the same.

While the University president and the Faculty dean were both casualties in a year of change, the Caucus of Chairs, an informal group of department heads that McDonald coordinated this past fall, saw its position strengthened.

Before McDonald, the chair of the Romance languages and literatures department, took over as caucus coordinator, the group’s six-month history primarily consisted of discussions among department heads who had complaints about University President Lawrence H. Summers’ handling of tenure reviews.

By the time she handed off the administration of the group to two new leaders at the end of the fall semester, the caucus had matured into a body that dealt with a far wider range of issues within the Faculty or Arts and Sciences (FAS), such as the curricular review and the Faculty’s long-term growth plans. Members had become more vocal in their criticisms of the perceived failures of the central administration.

In many ways, McDonald had helped build the foundation for the group that exists today—a more-permanent body that now even plans to expand after the resignation of Summers, with the potential to become one of the main players in FAS politics far into the future.

“Christie had a very tough job in the fall and did a great job,” says History Department Chair Andrew D. Gordon ’74, one of the Caucus’s two coordinators this semester, along with the environmental science and public policy concentration chair, James J. McCarthy.

THE FOUNDATION

When the then-acting chair of the folklore and mythology program, Jan Ziolkowski, began to organize informal meetings of department heads in February 2005—shortly after Summers’ now-infamous comments on women in science—discussions largely focused on the chairs’ experiences with administrators, who were not welcome at the meetings.

The chairs sought to construct “as detailed and objective picture as we could of what had been happening in the faculty,” Ziolkowski writes in an e-mail. But, he adds, the caucus’s long-term outlook was blurry.

The group “could have fizzled or could have developed a solely negative mission,” he writes. But with McDonald in charge, the caucus became an engine of reform.

A FOCUS ON THE ISSUES

One of the substantive changes that occurred under McDonald’s leadership of the caucus in the fall was the creation of a number of subgroups that addressed FAS-specific issues.

At an Oct. 6 meeting of the caucus, the chairs present decided to create four working groups, dealing with the issues of finance, the curricular review, governance, and planning for faculty hires.

Some of those subgroups ultimately reshaped FAS operations. For instance, FAS previously approved searches for hires well after Commencement. That put Harvard at a disadvantage vis-a-vis rival schools, which acted much earlier in the spring, chairs say. This year, FAS approved its new faculty searches in late May, they add.

“There was a clear evolution...from the crisis of the spring semester ’05 to dealing with urgent issues facing FAS and the university in the fall 05,” McDonald writes in an e-mail. “There was a sense of focus and purpose.”

A VOCAL ROLE

In September, for the first time, a major public statement emerged from the group. About two dozen former and current department heads wrote to the six-member panel charged with finding a replacement for Conrad K. Harper [see page 11], who had stepped down from the Harvard Corporation due to disagreements with Summers. The chairs spoke of “the atmosphere of mistrust and suspicion that has been created over the past four years” of Summers’ leadership. They called for the new Corporation member to have “a close affiliation with the academic world.” At a late September meeting, McDonald and Andrew A. Biewener, the chair of the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, presented the letter to the full Faculty.

When the University announced that Georgetown University law professor Patricia A. King would get the Corporation spot, the chairs got what they wanted.

In November, McDonald organized a similar letter in the wake of a Crimson report that Summers had planned to fire Dean of the Faculty William C. Kirby the previous year. The letter, which was signed by more than a dozen members of the caucus, criticized Summers for “backbiting.”

But even as McDonald and other chairs chastised the president, the caucus itself remained more or less apolitical. For instance, Department of Government Chair Nancy L. Rosenblum, who spoke in support of Summers last year, will be one of three caucus coordinators next fall.

“Christie very skillfully managed...keeping [the statements regarding Harper and Kirby] more or less separate from the groups activities” regarding policy, Gordon says.

This spring, McDonald stepped down from her post as caucus coordinator, but the group remains a fixture in FAS politics.

She now devotes herself to the study of French literature in her Boylston Hall corner office, but just steps away in University and Mass. Halls, her impact is still felt.

—Staff writer Evan H. Jacobs can be reached at ehjacobs@fas.harvard.edu.