But it was not until early March, when news broke that Smith and Dean of the College Evelynn M. Hammonds had authorized the secret searches of resident deans’ email accounts to find the source of a leak of information pertaining to the Government 1310 cheating case, that faculty members realized the full extent of the gulf between administrative action and faculty interests.

“I think that we’re prepared to accept a lot of things that we’re told when we trust the people telling us, and that was a moment when suddenly we couldn’t trust what we were being told anymore,” Jasanoff says of the email searches, the second of which violated faculty email privacy policy. “So I think that is why people went and really started to take a step back and feel concerned about the bigger picture.”

Upon taking that step back, faculty say they feel that the email searches are just one in a chain of top-down decisions—the closing of the Financial Planning Group announced last April, the move of SEAS to Allston, the continuing “taxation” of FAS center funds—taken without considering faculty input.

“I don’t think that people believe that there’s a lot of respectful drawing of faculty opinions into decisions about anything,” says government and sociology professor and former dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Theda R. Skocpol.

In addition to the absence of consultation, Winship says the administration has not been sufficiently transparent.

“Certainly the email issue has damaged trust,” says Winship. “But on a more fundamental level is a sense among the faculty that the administration doesn’t communicate very fully with them, and as a result they don’t know what the administration is doing.”

‘THE DEAN’S CABINET’

FAS has three formal mechanisms through which communication between faculty and administration is supposed to occur. The first and most direct is the monthly faculty meeting, to which all voting members of the faculty are invited to raise concerns and questions directly to Smith, Hammonds, University Provost Alan M. Garber ’76, and University President Drew G. Faust. The second is a number of standing committees that analyze and offer feedback on various topics and the third is the elected Faculty Council, which meets twice a month.

Smith chairs the group of 18 elected members—four tenured and two non-tenured representatives each from the arts and humanities, social science, and natural and applied science divisions. A handful of administrative deans usually attend as guests. Ideally the Faculty Council serves as a sounding board for concerns passed up from the faculty and policies passed down from the FAS Dean.

“If professors understand that they can speak to a Faculty Council representative [who] will report back to their constituency, so to speak, then there is a flow of information between the administration and the faculty,” says English professor Louis Menand.

However, professors who have served on Faculty Council, including Menand, say that it has become an ineffective channel of communication in recent years. The FAS Dean oversees the meeting agendas and, until recently, Smith has set aside little time for informal discussion. He declined to comment for this story.

“Faculty Council has always been thought of as the Dean’s cabinet,” says German professor Peter J. Burgard, a former member of the Council. Many professors say that this perception discourages participation. Fewer than one-third of eligible faculty voted in this year’s Council election, and professors complain of a chronically low number of candidates willing to run for the three-year term.

“I think we have a sense that everything we say they will say, ‘Yes, we understand,’ but not much more,” says history professor Charles S. Maier ’60, adding that even a little more effort by administrators to listen to faculty concerns would go a long way towards repairing the lines of communication.

Faculty members also complain that the Council’s deliberations are too secretive—meeting agendas and discussions are confidential—and that the group’s elected membership is too small to represent the various, and at times conflicting, needs of the faculty.

FINDING THE FORUM