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The planning body tasked with designing a University-wide faculty senate held its first meeting in early December, launching its work after seven of Harvard’s nine faculties voted to move forward.

The meeting came one month before the Harvard Medical School and School of Dental Medicine sent delegates to the group, leaving Harvard Business School — where faculty have yet to vote on whether to join the planning body — as the lone holdout.

University Professor Danielle S. Allen, who has led the push to create a faculty senate, wrote in an email that she and her colleagues decided to move forward after enough delegates had been elected to fill a majority of seats on the planning body.

When an informal working group began the effort last spring, they hoped the planning body would draw up a vision for the senate over the summer, according to Graduate School of Design professor Carole T. Voulgaris, a planning body delegate.

The planning body outlined in the working group’s April proposal would include representatives from each school. But — after more than eight months of slow progress through schools’ complex, often untested approval processes — the leaders of the senate initiative decided to proceed with the delegates they have.

The move signals that Allen and her colleagues don’t intend to lose momentum — perhaps hoping to avoid the fate of the most recent prior attempt to form a faculty senate, in 2012, which died over summer break.

But the work of the planning body remains in its early stages. The group has not decided whether it will form subcommittees or when and how regularly it will meet. Since it has yet to elect its steering committee, the 18-member working group from last spring — led by Allen — is serving as steering committee in the interim.

Even some schools that have chosen to join the planning body have yet to elect their representative. The Harvard Kennedy School and Law School are still in the process of designating their six total additional delegates.

So far, 28 of the 37 proposed members have been named: 12 from the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and 16 total from the Harvard Divinity School, Graduate School of Design, T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Graduate School of Education, Medical School, and School of Dental Medicine.

The HGSE faculty voted to elect professors Julie A. Reuben, Timothy P. McCarthy ’93, and Liya Escalera as its delegates, and the HSPH faculty elected professors Meredith B. Rosenthal, Margaret A. McConnell, and Jarvis T. Chen.

The planning body will operate under the Chatham House Rule, which allows members to share the contents of a discussion but not the names of speakers. Its members plan to communicate the group’s progress back to their respective schools as each delegation sees fit, according to Allen.

Some planning body delegates hope that now that eight of the nine faculties are on board, HBS may be more open to joining, Voulgaris said.

Allen said the members are “very excited” that all of Harvard’s faculties except for HBS have joined the initiative and that many delegates have already been elected.

“We are in the process of getting ourselves organized, and we are looking forward to a productive semester,” Allen said.

The planning body has not set a date for its next meeting.

—Staff writer William C. Mao can be reached at william.mao@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @williamcmao.

—Staff writer Veronica H. Paulus can be reached at veronica.paulus@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @VeronicaHPaulus.