HAA Announces Overseer Candidates

The Harvard Alumni Association released a list Thursday of 10 candidates gunning for a seat on Harvard’s Board of Overseers—the University’s second highest governing body.

Beginning in mid-April, alumni will be able to vote for five new Overseers to serve six-year terms on the 30-member board. An additional Overseer will be chosen to finish out the term of Arne S. Duncan ’86, who has joined President Barack Obama’s administration as Secretary of Education. The results of the election will be announced at this year’s June 4 Commencement ceremony.

The Board of Overseers serves as a sounding board for University administrators and conducts reviews of schools, programs, and specific issues of interest, such as campus arts. Major administrative and teaching appointments, such as that of the University President, require the approval of both the Overseers and the Corporation—the University’s chief governing body.

One nominee in this year’s election, Walter K. Clair ’77, who is a professor at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center, said he was contacted by the alumni association several months before candidates were announced to gauge his interest in serving as an Overseer. Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist and former Crimson editor Linda J. Greenhouse ’68—who for three decades covered the Supreme Court for the New York Times until her retirement last year—was perhaps the most high-profile figure on the HAA roster.

But for the first time since 1999, the ballot will also list two self-nominated candidates, who had to petition for over 200 alumni signatures to be considered in the election. Such write-in candidates have historically faced an uphill battle in the voting process. The last self-nominated candidate to win a seat on the board was Nobel Peace Prize-winning human rights activist Desmond Tutu in 1989.

President Obama himself, who ran as a self-nominated candidate in 1991 on a platform of divestment from South Africa, failed in his bid, boasting a thin resume pinned on his experience as a former “community development director” and Harvard Law Review president. Among the triumphant that year was then-senior vice president of Microsoft Steven A. Ballmer ’77, a former Crimson business editor.

Clair said he, like most HAA-nominated candidates, does not intend to campaign for the position. If elected, Clair said he would push to make a Harvard education more affordable for undergraduate and graduate students alike and to maintain the University’s commitment to a diverse community.

“It’s easy to do that when the endowment is up eight or 12 percent,” Clair said. “It’s much harder when the growth is not there.”

Clair said that in spite of the current economic climate, he hopes the University will continue to actively recruit for a diverse student body and faculty. Law School alumnus Harvey A. Silverglate, one of the two write-in candidates, said he would campaign to reform what he believes to be University censorship, as well as the College’s Administrative Board—which he deems “one of the worst, if not the worst, student disciplinary tribunals in the country.”

Filling out the 2009 ballot are Photeine M. Anagnostopoulos ’81, Joshua S. Boger, Morgan Chu, Mark D. Gearan ’78, Margaret A. Levi, Cristian Samper K., and Robert L. Freedman ’62.

—Staff writer Athena Y. Jiang can be reached at ajiang@fas.harvard.edu.

—Staff writer June Q. Wu can be reached at junewu@fas.harvard.edu.