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In its rush to fix uneven discipline, Harvard has built something worse.

University President Alan M. Garber ’76 recently announced that Harvard’s governing boards have empowered him to create a “faculty panel” drawn from the University Committee on Rights and Responsibilities to investigate and impose punishments in cross-school cases — a sort of Supreme Court of Harvard.

Uniform discipline is certainly necessary, but Harvard’s chosen vehicle — a faculty-only super-panel — both erases student voice and concentrates power in ways that invite political manipulation and due-process risks.

Consistency shouldn’t — and doesn’t — require a constitution rewrite. The existing UCRR already plays a role in coordinating fact-finding between schools; Harvard could simply authorize the whole committee to oversee discipline.

Instead, by housing a new body under the president’s purview, Harvard has gifted Trump and his allied politicians an obvious path to achieving their political goals: pressuring one administrator to get the disciplinary gears grinding in their favor.

Garber’s decision looks like a vain capitulation to the Trump administration, which demanded that Harvard create “a disciplinary process housed in one body that is accountable to Harvard’s president or other capstone official.” Whereas before, cross-school disciplinary decisions fell under the jurisdiction of the respective schools, now, the president can no longer deny responsibility, rendering the panel susceptible to external pressure.

And, of course, this restructuring of power neglects the most obvious legitimacy gap facing Harvard’s disciplinary system: that students are left out of the process altogether.

The UCRR, which has existed since 1970, consists of two faculty members and one student from each of Harvard’s schools. While it can investigate cases, it cannot discipline students directly.

Garber’s faculty panel, now endowed with disciplinary power, conspicuously excludes student members of the UCRR, isolating the governed from their governance and undermining the Harvard community’s social contract.

This isn’t an isolated oversight — it’s a pattern.

Less than a month before Garber’s announcement, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences committee responsible for reviewing the Administration Board dodged the question of student representation entirely.

The committee claimed it heard the idea too late — never mind that students have been calling for representation on the Ad Board since September, and for at least a decade before that.

Worse still, the committee didn’t just sidestep student representation — it also urged the FAS to strip students of their right to appeal certain sanctions, including probation. It was these very appeals that forced the Ad Board to reverse many of its excessive sanctions last year.

Standardizing the disciplinary process and ensuring faculty involvement is a step forward. Excluding students from every part of the process is two steps back.

As I have previously written, Harvard once recognized that solving student issues requires student voices. After the 2012 cheating scandal, the College reassigned academic integrity cases from the Ad Board to a new body composed of 50 percent students — the Honor Council.

It worked. By giving students responsibility, Harvard fostered legitimacy, buy-in, and a shared sense of accountability. The Honor Council reflects a truth this new disciplinary panel forgets: Students will respect systems they help govern.

Garber’s new panel abandons that lesson. Rather than trusting students with responsibility, it consolidates authority in a faculty-only tribunal with no built-in student voice and no apparent mechanism for democratic accountability.

It treats student protest as a threat to be managed, not a constituency to be heard.

I understand the pressures Harvard is facing — $2.2 billion is a lot to lose, and small concessions to political pressure might seem like a strategic trade. But when the University weakens its own internal democracy, it doesn’t appease critics — it invites more interference.

What Trump truly wants is not earnest improvements to Harvard’s disciplinary structures — it’s increased control over which students are punished and why. Anything short of complete acquiescence seems unlikely to prevent the federal government from making further funding withdrawals.

Harvard’s discipline problem starts with who’s missing from the room. Until students win seats at the table and presidential decree is swapped for participatory governance, inconsistent justice simply becomes consistent injustice.

Matthew R. Tobin ’27, a Crimson Editorial editor, is a double concentrator in Government and Economics in Winthrop House.