According to article 1, section 1, of the Council’s charter, which was passed on Dec. 2, 1969, the Council “will advise the Dean of the Faculty on allocations of space, building programs, and plans and priorities for Faculty growth and development.”

Not all professors see the shift toward centralization as an unqualified loss for the University. Lee Professor of Economics Claudia Golden says Summers’ instincts to centralize control will make for speedier execution of University-wide initiatives.

“Larry is good for Harvard,” Goldin says. “A large fraction of faculty at Harvard know that we need to be brought into the twenty-first century so that we can continue to be a great university, particularly in the sciences.”

TENURE AND TEACHING

At the heart of the Summers-Faculty clash rest two aspects of governance over which professors say they have historically exercised significant oversight—tenure appointments and curricular reform.

Many professors say that on ad hoc tenure committees—advisory committees that vet tenure candidates before the University president decides whether or not to grant the candidate tenure—Summers aggressively pushes his favored candidates over others and show favoritism towards certain subfields within a discipline, stifling a department’s ability to make its own appointments.

“Summers came in with a fairly strong vision of strengthening certain kinds of areas and letting others go,” says one senior faculty member, speaking on the condition of anonymity because tenure meetings are off the record.

Summers denies that he ignores departmental tenure recommendations.

“Anybody who feels that way about a specific case, my door’s always open, and I’d like to talk about it with them,” Summers says. “I think the rate at which ...departmental recommendations have been turned down is very much in line, or if anything slightly lower during my time as president, than in the case of my predecessors.”

While they have no say in who comes up for tenure, University presidents have always had the sole power to grant tenure appointments. Though professors say they are not disputing Summers’ right to that power, they do say they want him to have less of an influence on which candidates are approved and show more respect for a department’s preferences.

“Our concern is not so much the structure of the ad hoc committees as the President’s role on those occasions,” says Judith L. Ryan, who is the acting chair of the Germanic languages and literature department and is a member of the group of chairs.

Summers and the Faculty have of late clashed to a lesser extent over the College’s ongoing curricular review.

While Summers’ influence on the shape of the review’s current recommendations has been disputed, most professors expressed satisfaction when it was revealed that the President decided earlier this semester to cease all formal involvement in the curricular review.

“He came under the general criticism that he was trying to micromanage some of the Faculty’s affairs, so I think he decided that it would be best if he withdrew,” Baird Professor of Science Gary J. Feldman said last month.

In the past two curricular reviews, University presidents have played large roles in forming the new curricula—James Conant ’13 produced the bestselling Redbook on general education in the late 1940s, and Derek Bok spearheaded the formation of today’s Core Curriculum.