Yet the current body defends the secrecy of its workings.

“A good Corporation member has to understand the difference between visibility and confidentiality,” Houghton says. “Members should be visible but meetings really are confidential and should remain so.”

According to Houghton, Corporation meetings should allow the president to speak freely, and increased openness would compromise the candor of these discussions.

But Houghton, who in his years on the Corporation worked to establish stronger working ties with the 30 members of Harvard’s Board of Overseers, draws a distinction between the confidentiality necessary to the operations of Harvard’s equivalent of a Board of Directors and the Corporation’s visibility on campus.

Protecting the confidentiality of the Corporation’s meetings does not preclude improved visibility—Corporation members’ presence at campus events, interactions with the campus community, and broader understanding of campus life—Houghton maintains.

The Corporation of the distant past consisted of a group of six Boston attorneys who would meet with the President every other week, according to Reischauer. Such frequent interactions—and consistent presence on campus—made Corporation members an active part of the campus community.

Current Corporation members acknowledge that the recent past has been marked by a dearth of direct interaction with the community, though that may have stemmed from the sheer size of the University rather than their lack of will.

“We all would have all liked to have done a lot more interacting with the various parts of the University, but there is a time limit,” Houghton says. “This place is immense, and it strains the normal interactions because there’s so much to do.”

But the organization also became more geographically dispersed as Harvard’s reach expanded outside the northeast, and what was once a close relationship between the University’s governing body and its community became progressively more difficult to maintain.

Today, Corporation Fellows are mainly situated on the East Coast, but none live full-time in the Boston area, and treasurer James F. Rothenberg ’68 lives in Los Angeles.

But with Lee’s appointment, the Corporation will have a Boston-based Fellow. Lee has lived in the Boston area since joining WilmerHale in 1975 after graduating from Cornell Law School and currently resides in Wellesley, Mass.

Lee’s geographic proximity, Corporation members reason, will enable him to be involved in campus life in a way that has not been seen since the late 1990s.

The father of a recent Harvard College graduate who is currently enrolled at Harvard Business School and Harvard Kennedy School, Lee is no stranger to the stands of Harvard’s sports arenas—women’s swimming and men’s soccer in particular, he says. And as a lecturer at Harvard Law School, Lee’s podium is just a few minutes walk from Harvard Yard.

“The hope is to find some way where people come not just to tell me what’s on their mind but also to listen,” Lee says. “By the time the fall comes along and I’ve been on the Corporation for three months, I’ll have something substantive to communicate as well.”

ENTER LEE