By SARA E. POLSKY

Crimson Staff Writer

Even before Harvard undergraduates had settled into their dorms for the start of the fall semester, 18 of the most active professors in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) gathered for a summit at Boston’s Harvard Club to plot a course for the year to come.

The retreat—if not the first of its kind, then the only one in modern memory, according to council members—was a step in a new direction for the Faculty Council, the 18-member elected governing body of FAS, and a sign of the larger role they hope to play in FAS affairs this year.

Last spring, the Council had heavy input into two of the most contentious topics facing the Faculty, acting as intermediaries between the Faculty and the Harvard Corporation—the University’s seven-member governing board—during the uproar surrounding University President Lawrence H. Summers and also leveling crippling criticism against a draft of the General Education report for the Harvard College Curricular Review.

The Council, with several new members elected in May, emerged from last semester with a renewed sense of its dual purpose of advising Dean of the Faculty William C. Kirby and acting as the Faculty’s only elected representatives.

This year, the Council will seek to fill both of these roles more vigorously than in recent years.

“Those are not necessarily the same things,” said Anthropology Department Chair Arthur Kleinman, a member of the Council. “The Faculty Council has made it clear it wants to do both, and do it with more robustness than has perhaps been present in the past.”

At the Harvard Club retreat, Council members discussed some of the issues that will face FAS in the coming year, such as Allston planning, the curricular review, and implementing the recommendations of two task forces on faculty diversity. They also have pledged to be more transparent about their own discussions while tracking the pulse of the Faculty, particularly by receiving input from a group of department chairs who have met weekly since February.

RECLAIMING HISTORY

Founded on December 2, 1969 in response to the student unrest on campus and calls for more democratic governance of FAS, the Faculty Council was charged with advising the Dean of the Faculty on “allocations of space, building programs, and plans and priorities for Faculty growth and development.”

In its nearly 40-year history, the Council has brought its authority to bear on issues ranging from the minutiae of undergraduate education to rights for homosexuals at Harvard, while grappling with day-to-day issues of faculty governance.

“The Faculty Council, if you read the statement giving it its charge, was to be both a kind of kitchen cabinet to the dean and to be the elected representation of the Faculty,” Kleinman said.

In recent years, though, the Council has held predominantly an advisory role, rather than focusing on advocacy for the more than 670 professors in FAS.

But Council members said that this year’s March 15 vote of no confidence, when Faculty-Summers tensions reached their boiling point, has empowered the Council to raise its voice on behalf of their fellow faculty members.