Professors participate in 67 standing committees, and many, including Smith, cite the Faculty Council—a body of 18 elected tenure-track and non-tenured faculty—as one of the strongest forums for dialogue.
But faculty members also confess that their priorities—teaching and research—often come before their desire to participate in faculty governance.
“Faculty have always had a rather odd attitude,” says Rosovsky. “On the one hand they want to influence decisions, and on the other hand, they don’t want to put in the time to change things.”
PRIVATE OR PUBLIC?
Kirby says that professors will get involved if they are included in decisions they care about. And faculty members have not been shy about expressing their frustration when not consulted on such decisions.
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Months after leaders of the newly-organized Harvard University Library announced their intention to reduce its workforce, for example, uproar has yet to die down over the lack of faculty input in the library’s transition process. Many suggest that the library, the University’s primary asset in scholarship, cannot be effectively governed from the top down.
“If what has happened to the library is evidence, then it’s not a good thing to be more corporate,” says English professor Joseph C. Harris. “There’s nobody listening when faculty members are talking. There’s nobody listening up there.”
Even the monthly Faculty Meetings do not always provide a satisfactory forum through which professors can engage in spontaneous and frank discussion. Just a few weeks ago, the sudden announcement of the central administration’s decision to close the Financial Planning Group—which provides many faculty members with financial advice and retirement planning services—drew sharp criticism from professors.
At the faculty meeting this May, multiple professors used the question period to challenge Provost Alan M. Garber ’76 on his decision to close the FPG without first consulting faculty. But because the discussion was not part of the meeting’s agenda, an 80 percent majority vote from the faculty would have been required to extend conversation on the matter—a motion that did not pass.
“[The Docket Committee] several times thought about trying to arrange time at faculty meetings for more wide-ranging discussions—we never quite saw a way of doing it,” says Richard J. Tarrant, interim dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and a classics professor. “There is some kind of structural problem or obstacle to having that kind of open discussion.”
“It seems to me that the faculty and administration are not communicating as well as they have in the past,” says German professor Peter J. Burgard, adding that those who expressed frustration over the FPG decision are planning a meeting to discuss communication within the faculty and with the administration, along with stronger methods of faculty governance.
Almost all Harvard faculty interviewed for this article said that as a result of being excluded from important discussions, the sense of ownership they used to feel for Harvard and FAS—their University, their school—is dissipating.
“Some colleagues have suggested we might discuss the possibility of a faculty senate or some kind of caucus,” Burgard says. “We have faculty governance, technically. It’s just a question to what degree it happens in practice.”
KEEPING UP WITH THE COMPETITION
Harvard is not alone in witnessing a burgeoning bureaucracy in recent years.
