After a new round of negotiations, Harvard came to an agreement over the summer under which Ford issued a side letter reaffirming its commitment to academic freedom. Dartmouth, Brown, Johns Hopkins and Chicago eventually accepted similar resolutions with Ford, according to Harvard spokesman Joe Wrinn.
“We do not want or intend to interfere with discussions in classrooms, faculty publications, student remarks in chat rooms, or other communications that express the views of the individual(s) and not the institution,” the letter says. “Our grant letter relates only to the official speech and conduct of the university and to speech or conduct that the university explicitly endorses.”
Saller says although some were concerned by Harvard’s decision to proceed, many universities were satisfied with the compromise. The provosts of many of the schools shared their views on the compromise during a summer conference call, he says.
“To say that it’s unilateral would lose sight of the fact that the provost of Harvard was continually circulating this language,” Saller says. “It is true that there are a couple of institutions that had very strong concerns…[but] those who were especially concerned at that point seemed to me to be a minority.”
He adds that he was “astonished” that the universities cooperated so much in the first place, so it was unsurprising when they started to negotiate separate agreements, noting that faculty pressure to resolve the issue was an important factor at some schools.
“Stanford obviously has a different position, and if you’re Stanford you’d hope none of us had settled,” Hyman says. But “when you read that language, it’s hard to know what we should still be complaining about.”
Columbia kept negotiating, successfully pushing Ford for a narrower definition of what constitutes the school’s official speech, according to Columbia Provost Alan Brinkley.
“The language that Harvard negotiated restricted the language of the grant only to what it called official speech and conduct of the university,” Brinkley says. “We felt that was still too broad…we wanted to make sure that they did not claim that official actions of the university included things like decisions of hiring faculty, curriculum and program development, [and] academic decision-making.”
And while most schools have settled, Stanford is still holding out. Stanford “continues to study” the new language, according to Kate Chesley, Stanford’s associate director of university communications.
Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology Theda Skocpol, who is working on a Ford-funded project through the Center for American Political Studies on the moral aspects of American women’s civil rights a nd social reform movements, says that she opposed the new language, even though it would never have affected her. The negotiations did interrupt her funding, but Hyman’s office provided money for her and other grantees in the interim.
“In my opinion, the University was always right in this matter,” Skocpol says. “I get money from the Ford Foundation, and I’m very grateful for it, but they were wrong.”
Skocpol says that she is satisfied with the compromise. But, she adds, “the side language leaves me wondering why we had to go through all of this in the first place.”
—Staff writer Stephen M. Marks can be reached at marks@fas.harvard.edu.