Students Named to Presidential Search Advisory Committee

Harvard unveiled the list of students who will formally weigh in on the University’s ongoing presidential search Tuesday—the last of three advisory committees the search committee promised to appoint after University President Drew G. Faust announced she will step down next summer.

Third-year Law student and Cabot House tutor Jyoti Jasrasaria ’12 will chair the 18-member committee, which includes at least one representative from each of Harvard’s 12 degree-granting schools. Students will “provide advice to the presidential search committee” and “assist in ensuring broad outreach to the wider Harvard community,” according to the announcement.

“As the presidential search progresses, we look forward to benefiting from the varied perspectives of this impressive group of students from many different parts of Harvard,” said William F. Lee ’72, senior fellow of the Harvard Corporation and chair of the presidential search committee. “We hope and expect both to learn from their insights and experience, and to enlist their help in ensuring that we are hearing views of a wider range of students about Harvard and its future.”

This presidential search is only the second in recent memory to formally involve student input. The 2006 search committee appointed the first student advisory body after students decried their exclusion from the secretive process in 2000.

Two days after Faust announced she would step down, Undergraduate Council President Yasmin Z. Sachee ’18 and Vice President Cameron K. Khansarinia ’18 sent an email to Lee, requesting a meeting to discuss the process. Student leaders called for an expanded role in the search, with some urging the search committee to add students to their ranks.

The search committee—comprised of the 12 members of the Harvard Corporation plus three members of the Board of Overseers—has not taken that step, opting instead to create a separate advisory body as in 2006.

The search committee appointed faculty and staff committees in August, two months after Faust made public her intention to leave her post. Lee also sent a Harvard-wide email over the summer, calling on University affiliates to submit their thoughts on the search to a designated email address—an overture the University repeated in Tuesday’s announcement.

The search remains in "information-gathering" mode, according to a member of the search committee.

The full composition of the student search committee is below:

• Jyoti Jasrasaria ’12 (chair), Harvard Law School

• Grace Cho, Harvard Extension School

• Christopher Cleveland ’14, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

• Carlos Estrada Alamo, Harvard Medical School (joint with Harvard Business School)

• Thomas Fox, Harvard Kennedy School of Government

• Eamon O’Connor, Graduate School of Design (joint with Harvard Kennedy School of

Government)

• Bora Plaku-Alakbarova, Harvard Chan School of Public Health

• Federico Roitman ’18, Harvard College

• Lisa Utzinger Shen, Harvard Graduate School of Education

• Nina Srivastava ’18, Harvard College

• Roodolph St. Pierre, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

• Jacob Steiner, Harvard Law School

• Taylor Stewart, Harvard Divinity School

• Kelly Suralik, Harvard School of Dental Medicine

• Nathaniel Vincent ’20, Harvard College

• Becca Voelcker, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

• Andrea Weber, Harvard Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences

• Kenneth Zauderer, Harvard Business School

—Staff writer Claire E. Parker can be reached at claire.parker@thecrimson.com. Follow her on Twitter @ClaireParkerDC.