“We must never again have a situation like the one that concerns us today,” she concluded.
Though they were quick to accept administrators’ apologies, faculty members who spoke up at the meeting said reconciliation between the two groups would not be that easy.
“It seems to me that trust has to be based on something,” said classics professor Richard F. Thomas, a member of the Faculty Council. “The request that you make that we have trust suggests there aren’t consequences from this past case that go beyond saying simply, ‘Let’s all talk and get along together.’”
Pointing to faculty’s hesitance in the meeting to address the issue, a number of professors said the case illustrates a larger communication problem between faculty and increasingly distant administrators.
“As the size of the administration has grown over the past 10 to 15 years... it has inevitably produced a sense of unhelpful distance between the administrative decision-making process and the faculty who are affected by it,” said History of Art and Architecture professor Jeffrey F. Hamburger, a member of the Faculty Council. He likened the experience of trying to speak with administrators about certain issues to “waiting to get an audience with Louis XIV in Versailles.”
History professor Maya R. Jasanoff ’96, the faculty’s docket committee chair, said she feels a new, less formal form of communication is needed to ease the existing strain between faculty and their administrators.
Fellow history professor Lisa M. McGirr echoed Jasanoff, suggesting that a docketed discussion about faculty governance be proposed for the May faculty meeting. She characterized the email searches as one of several recent top-down decisions that have created a “gap between the administration and faculty over our sense of our rights and responsibilities.”
For their part, administrators pledged to open new avenues of communication for faculty in the near term and consider longer-term proposals about how they might better communicate.
Because nearly 50 minutes had elapsed before Faust could guide the meeting back to its scheduled agenda, discussion of three docketed items, including an honor code proposal, was limited. Smith’s presentation on proceedings for revising policies on faculty work outside of the University drew no comments. Faculty members who voiced concern over the honor code proposal and another proposal to alter the structure of reading and exam periods focused primarily on issues of trust and communication raised earlier in the meeting.
Responding to Dean of Undergraduate Education Jay M. Harris’s honor code presentation, mathematics professor Wilfried Schmid raised concern over whether or not specific conditions at Harvard had contributed to the Government 1310 cheating case and a general breakdown in academic integrity. He suggested that flawed teaching in Government 1310 and more general attitudes by faculty and administrators could have as large an effect on academic integrity as student attitudes.
“Yes, now students will be asked to sign an academic integrity pledge, but how about us? How about us as faculty?” he said.
—Sabrina A. Mohamed contributed to the reporting of this story.
—Staff writer Nicholas P. Fandos can be reached at nicholasfandos@college.harvard.edu. Follow him on Twitter @npfandos.
CLARIFICATION: April 2, 2013
An earlier version of this article stated that Boston lawyer Michael Keating will help produce a report on past email searches and surveillance at Harvard. To clarify, Keating will work to verify the accuracy of the information about the searches presented on Tuesday.