In 1991, Harvard's most famous dean of the Faculty wrote his final report to the University's governing boards.

Henry Rosovsky was concerned as he wrote the report, that professors no longer felt part of the Harvard community or lived up to an ideal of "citizenship" within the University.

"We have every right to assume that a Harvard professor's primary obligation is to the institution-essentially students and colleagues-and that all else is secondary," the dean wrote.

But, Rosovsky said, faculty were no longer honoring their "social contract" with the University. They were not spending time in Cambridge or making themselves available for students, he wrote.

Today, the problem Rosovsky noted in 1991 is even worse, professors say.

Despite faculty committees intended to oversee nearly every issue at Harvard from athletics to the core curriculum, many faculty are not plugged in to students life or even to the programs their own committees oversee.

Professors feel tied to their individual fields of study, or the scholarly plaudits of the outside world, not to the University or its students.

"There's a saying,' every tub on its own bottom,' that characterizes the strong autonomy of the faculty," says Baird Professor of Science Dudley R. Herschbach. "As members of a would-wide community, our first allegiances are often to a field of research."

The result is an ever-expanding role for the University's central administration, and increasing autonomy for programs nominally overseen by professors as part of their service to the University community.

When faculty abdicate their responsibilities, some say, the sad result can be badly-run programs with little or no supervision.

And without a strong faculty voice in the University's overall governance, the teachers and scholars who make Harvard a university may lose their representation in its affairs.

"The University is losing its cohesion and the power is distinctly shifting to the administration," says Ford Professor of Social Sciences Emeritus David Riesman '34.

The Decline of community

Rosovsky is not the only one to have noted a decline in the faculty's feeling of community membership or citizenship.

"Very few professors today are willing to give Harvard more than they take," says Harvey C. Mansfield Jr. '53, Kenan professor of government.