Beginning this spring, students, faculty and employees upset with working conditions or at odds with their colleagues will be able to consult confidentially with an independent faculty intermediary who will help resolve their problems.

The University has named Clowes Research Professor Henry Ehrenreich to the newly created position of University ombudsperson, from which he will provide impartial advice, informally mediate disputes and direct community members to conflict resolution processes already in place.

Ehrenreich will not have authority to impose solutions or order changes to policy. But he will be able to independently gather facts and act as an intermediary between complainants and the University.

His University-wide office will be staffed with a professional conflict resolution expert and overseen by a faculty committee. While it will not replace ombuds offices at a number of Harvard’s schools, Ehrenreich’s will provide a central resource and report back to the administration about general patterns that deserve University-wide response.

According to Provost Steven E. Hyman, the idea of an ombudsperson arose in the wake of the Katz Committee report on labor and wage policy at Harvard issued last year. The idea was to address the “perception that some employees feel they have no ‘safe harbor’ to take concerns,” Hyman wrote in an e-mail.

But as it will be implemented, the office will serve a broader constituency, including students and faculty.

“Where [ombuds] offices exist...they serve the purpose of providing individuals with a confidential place to take concerns about their work or student life, about their co-workers or their managers, or about Harvard policy,” Hyman said.

With the creation of the position, Harvard joins roughly 300 colleges and universities—including the University of Pennsylvania and MIT—with school-wide ombudspeople.

According to Herman W. Hill, former president of the University and College Ombuds Association, the position takes on a wide variety of meanings at these schools.

The modern academic ombuds position had origins during student radical- ism of the 1960s, he said. And at many schools, conflicts involving students remain a primary focus.

Hill, who recently retired as ombudsperson for the University of Ohio, said he dealt with as many as 300 cases a year, about 80 percent of which were conflicts between faculty and students. Disputes about the tenure process also frequently came to his office.

For a university, the ombudsperson can be a cost-effective investment, as it can save the school millions of dollars in legal fees stemming from court battles and lawsuits.

“If I helped avert one lawsuit per year, I felt I was earning my salary,” Hill said.

But for the office to work, Hill said, universities also need to respect its independence and give ombudspeople access to the inner workings of the institution, a condition that administrations sometimes chafe at.

According to Ehrenreich, many of the details of how the Harvard ombuds office will function remain to be worked out.