School’s Out For Summer

Writing this column yet again, I feel like a DJ who plays the same song over and over again: The governance of this College is broken. If we needed any further proof, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) provided it last Tuesday when it failed to achieve quorum at its most recent meeting. Over the past four years, votes at a third of FAS’s meetings have been meaningless because our rotating deans could not gather a sixth of the Faculty’s 700-or-so members—the minimum threshold for votes to become University law.

Last Tuesday, FAS Dean Michael D. Smith hoped to lower that threshold to an eighth for future meetings. Unfortunately, he couldn’t get a sixth that one last time to make the change official. FAS meetings may become a farce if this trend continues: 70 to 100 faculty members will meet for afternoon tea in University Hall, discuss a few agenda items, raise their hands to vote, and then realize that nothing they have said or done has any power because quorum has not been reached.

Students are by no means immune to the same critique. Few House Committees (HoCo) gather more than a dozen or so students on a weekly basis, and only 15 students attended last Wednesday’s open forum organized by the Committee on the Roles and Responsibilities of the Undergraduate Council. Why all of this indifference?

Students and faculty members are busy, clearly, but I doubt that they weren’t in the 1970s and 1980s when HoCos were a “big” event and FAS rarely missed quorum. Randomization has obviously hurt House life, but I don’t think that gets to the root of changes either. Mather HoCo, the major anomaly in House life, frequently has 60-80 people at its meetings.

At the open forum on Wednesday, Mather House co-Master Sandra Naddaff ’75 suggested many reasons why Mather HoCo has been so popular over the past four years, but a few stuck out for me: her open acknowledgement of the importance of dialogue with students about decisions concerning House life, her respect for students’ maturity, and her desire to work with students, even about prickly issues such as alcohol.

The most important thing about this give-and-take between Faculty and students is that it takes time, effort, and dedication. Everyone involved must value the deliberative process of coming to decisions democratically. So when I read in The Crimson that Dean Smith viewed the lowering of quorum as a “streamlining” procedure, I got a little worried. I became even more worried by his statement that he cares about the reasons why faculty members do not attend meetings, “but I think we have to be very careful to not allow the business of the FAS...to be ground to a halt because of whatever it is that makes people not come.”

Isn’t FAS business, by definition, “ground to a halt” if quorum is not reached at FAS meetings? Not in today’s modern world, of course—faculty members are not involved in most of the school’s day-to-day operations. But University Professor Stanley Hoffmann had it right when he responded to Smith by comparing the messy behemoth that is FAS central administration to the bureaucratic morass of his home country, France.

With billions of dollars pouring in and administrators popping up left and right, it seems inevitable that professors and students—though professors more so—are left out of the loop regarding decisions over which they once exercised influence. Professor John E. Dowling, who sits on the Standing Committee on Admissions and Financial Aid, discussed at Wednesday’s open forum his bewilderment at the decision to close the College to transfer students this year. No one informed the Committee, and no one could say for sure who made the decision.

If faculty members are being left out of major decisions that shape the University, why would they show up to FAS meetings? Most students are so resigned to the fact of their irrelevance in deciding all the things that concern their happiness at school—the control of social space, party and liquor rules, educational policies—that they have given up. The College is not the same as it was in 1636, so if it is to remain the special educational community that it dreams itself to be, students and faculty members must work together to stop the encroachment by the Office of General Counsel and outside consultants only worried about “streamlining.”

If Mather is any indication, the key to ending democratic apathy among students (and possibly faculty members) is an increase in responsibility, power, and respect. Students have already recognized that the Empire of the Central Administration has maligned them—will the Faculty come around as well? We have some preeminent professors here that write about democracy and its discontents (hi, Professor Sandel). I only hope that their research gets applied to Harvard before everyone forgets the opportunities that a College community provides for experimenting with its governance.

Andrew D. Fine ’09, a former Crimson associate editorial chair, is a social studies concentrator in Eliot House. His column appears on alternate Mondays.