Although the need to reform the governance structure is clear, how to do so is not. Faculty acknowledge that appeals to the administration will be more successful if they can present a cohesive set of concerns. But with a diverse range of interests specific to discipline and post, this can be difficult. Furthermore, these differences are hard to reconcile within the formal framework of the faculty meeting, which represents the only opportunity for dialogue across the entire faculty body.

After administrators announced last April the unexpected and controversial closure of the popular Financial Planning Group, which provided professors with financial advising and retirement planning services, a group led by Burgard began to consider a potential faculty senate in which faculty members could articulate a collective stance on key administrative decisions, without administrative oversight.

That idea quickly faded with the academic year’s end, but the desire for some kind of faculty-only institution remains, with professors still wary of the administration’s commitment to faculty interests. Winship, who helped organize the Faculty Council’s self-evaluation in November, says that an additional deliberative forum could raise the volume of faculty input.

But other members of Faculty Council are less willing to give up on the structures already in place. Jasanoff, who has led the charge for faculty to discuss communication, says that faculty members need to fully engage the Council and monthly faculty meetings before they look outward to alternatives.

To that end, Jasanoff and other members say the Council has taken a number of key steps towards internal reform during the last year. After their November meeting, more unstructured time was incorporated into Council meetings—a development that months later permitted the Council to push for a faculty-wide conversation about governance. A committee will convene next fall to officially review the function and structure of the Council.

Faculty have also proposed a number of alternative feedback mechanisms. Concerned over proposed changes to the University policy on reporting outside activity conducted online, English professor James T. Engell ’73 advocated for the creation of a faculty Wiki to aggregate written feedback. And following the December faculty meeting, during which faculty members had their first lengthy debate on edX, a town-hall style meeting was organized to continue the conversation in an informal setting.

“I think that one of our challenges is, we need to make it easier for faculty to express themselves and for us to hear them, and that’s one reason why I applaud efforts like creating a forum or a blog or a Wiki,” Garber says.

VOLUME CONTROL

The FAS governance structure is largely reactionary in nature—a product of the early 1970s, when faculty were looking to regain control after the tumultuous years of student protests and University restructuring that marked the late 1960s. At that time, FAS decided to introduce a permanent Council to advise the FAS Dean and set the agenda for the faculty as a whole. In the decades since, the efficacy of the Council has waxed and waned with the interests of the faculty.

In 2005, 218 faculty members—a clear majority of those who voted—rallied together to issue a vote of no confidence against former University President Lawrence H. Summers when they decided he was obstructing their priorities.

Gathered at a similar faculty meeting eight years later, faculty members worried earlier this month that their existing mechanisms of governance have become stale and overly formalized.

“Individual faculty members face a decision about...whether they accept the system that’s in place or whether it is they move on,” Rosen says.

Gardner, who is in his sixth decade as a member of the University, says that it is up to the faculty to take the initiative to make things work—to be willing to take back the University owner’s manual.

“Even though the place gets bigger and more complicated, that is no excuse for losing the faculty governance and communication aspect, and so those have to be reinvented for a more complex situation,” he says. “If we don’t reinvent the good stuff it’s all going to disappear.”

—Staff writer Nicholas P. Fandos can be reached at nicholasfandos@college.harvard.edu. Follow him on Twitter @npfandos.

—Staff writer Sabrina A. Mohamed can be reached at smohamed@college.harvard.edu. Follow her on Twitter at @sab_mohamed.