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Updated April 24, 2025, at 6:02 p.m.
Harvard will create a process for University President Alan M. Garber ’76 to call a faculty panel to investigate and impose penalties in cross-school disciplinary cases, Garber announced in a Thursday evening email to Harvard affiliates.
The panel — which would consist of faculty members of the University Committee on Rights and Responsibilities — will have the power to oversee cases involving possible violations of two University-wide policies governing protest and the use of campus spaces.
Garber wrote that the change, which was approved by Harvard’s governing boards, was made to standardize disciplinary procedures after students “have participated in the same disruptive activity but received significantly different discipline” from their schools’ disciplinary bodies.
The announcement comes two weeks after the Trump administration asked Harvard to adopt “a disciplinary process housed in one body that is accountable to Harvard’s president or other capstone official” in exchange for its federal funding.
Harvard rejected the administration’s demands as “unconstitutional” and sued nine federal agencies over the demands on Monday. But Thursday’s move signals that Harvard may be willing to accede to some demands that its leaders see as in the University’s own institutional interest.
At the same time, the decision to center the new process in a faculty body could limit backlash from professors who have asserted their authority over disciplinary decisions.
“Details will need to be worked out, but the procedures will be designed to ensure continued faculty agency in the disciplinary processes affecting their students and will ensure due process for all our students,” Garber wrote in his Thursday email.
Garber will be able to ask the faculty panel to investigate cases brought under the University-wide Statement on Rights and Responsibilities, a Vietnam War-era policy governing speech and protest at Harvard, and under Harvard’s new campus use rules. Rolled out in August, the campus use rules require approval for signage and gatherings and limit tactics — including the use of chalking and sound amplification — favored by participants in the pro-Palestine Harvard Yard encampment last spring.
The names of members of the UCRR — which was created in 1970 to enforce the USRR — are not public, but the group consists of two faculty members and one student from each Harvard school.
The Thursday announcement comes after the University received intense criticism over its handling of disciplinary cases involving students who have taken part in pro-Palestine demonstrations on campus since Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023 attack on Israel and Israel’s retaliatory war in Gaza.
When eight students staged an occupation of University Hall for one day, but were not suspended or put on probation — only “admonished because of inappropriate social behavior” — top Harvard administrators worried that they had little oversight of or power over disciplinary cases.
During a transcribed interview with the House Committee on Education and Workforce in August, Harvard Corporation Senior Fellow Penny S. Pritzker ’81 acknowledged that the “uneven enforcement of rules” posed a major challenge for University administrators.
“The Corporation finds that unacceptable,” Pritzker said. “It’s not fair. It’s not right. And so it’s something that we have – have been very clear about with the people who need to now rectify this.”
The decentralization of Harvard’s disciplinary processes — and the possibility that students from different schools would receive radically different outcomes — became a flashpoint after the pro-Palestine encampment last spring.
Harvard College’s Ad Board suspended five students and placed 20 others on probation — preventing 13 seniors from graduating during the University’s Commencement ceremony in May. Graduate students largely received slaps on the wrist or were let off without punishment altogether.
The differing disciplinary sentences were a focal point of criticism from Harvard’s top critics in Washington. In September, the House Committee on Education and the Workforce alleged that five of Harvard’s graduate schools had not issued “meaningful sanctions” on protesters and that the University had “failed to enforce its own rules and impose meaningful discipline.”
Garber, who began his term in the tumultuous months after Claudine Gay’s resignation from the Harvard presidency, has repeatedly amended protest and speech policies at Harvard to address concerns about non-uniform procedures — and to quell outrage from the University’s fiercest critics in Cambridge and Washington.
Within three weeks of being appointed to Harvard’s top post, Garber clarified the forms of protest and dissent that violated the USSR.
In July, Garber revised the fact-finding process for disciplinary cases involving students from multiple schools, adopting a standardized 11-step process that included using a fact-finding committee and an independent investigator. Shortly after, Harvard rolled out the campus use rules.
In his Thursday message, which was also signed by Provost John F. Manning ’82, Garber pledged to “soon release provisional procedures” to allow the UCRR to begin enforcing the new policies. Garber will also establish a process for reviewing and updating the procedures every two academic years.
—Staff writer Dhruv T. Patel can be reached at dhruv.patel@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @dhruvtkpatel.
—Staff writer Grace E. Yoon can be reached at grace.yoon@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @graceunkyoon.
