Planning Body Releases Final Bylaws for Harvard Faculty Senate After Input From University Leadership

Harvard’s faculty senate planning body released a final set of proposed bylaws for the group Thursday, outlining a largely advisory body that would work closely with top Harvard officials to address University-wide issues.

The new bylaws, officially endorsed by Harvard President Alan M. Garber ’76 and Provost John F. Manning ’82 in an accompanying letter, appear to address concerns from administrators about the body’s makeup and interactions with existing governance structures. In a report dissecting the new bylaws, planning body members urged each school to adopt the bylaws this year, with senators ideally taking seats in July 2027.

The planning body released draft bylaws for a 43-member senate spanning Harvard’s faculties roughly a year ago, with voting set for the 2025-26 academic year. After a February meeting with Garber and Manning, members of the planning body voted to delay the submission for sidebar discussions between four members of the planning body and four faculty representing the president and provost.

In a letter accompanying the final bylaws, Garber and Manning wrote that they “support the bylaws as now drafted.” Among the “elements of this compromise” they highlighted was a provision allowing them and all the deans of the represented faculties to serve as ex-officio members of the senate.

A new stipulation requires all senators to be elected via an approval voting process, in which voters select candidates they consider acceptable — a change the planning body said “guards against factional capture.” The final bylaws also hold that if fewer than 60 percent of eligible faculty do not vote, the election will be invalid and the seats filled by sortition.

“To avoid the common issue of low-turnout elections that make many faculty senates unrepresentative, the new bylaws take concrete steps to help ensure that Senators broadly represent their respective Faculties,” Garber and Manning wrote in the letter.

The new bylaws require a two-thirds vote for the senate to express a view on issues “of substantial concern to the University community.” As in the draft proposal, statements must comply with Harvard’s institutional voice policies.

University professor Danielle S. Allen, an architect of the faculty senate effort, said the group “can’t anticipate in advance what kind of cases might arise, but the important point is that we’ve aimed to build a body that will deliberate carefully with the core principles and mission of the University in mind.”

The procedure “reflects our recognition that the University sometimes benefits from speaking with one voice, especially in moments of crisis, and that hasty or sectarian proclamations attributable to Harvard’s faculty could thus do meaningful harm—particularly when we know that some in the media, and even hostile litigants, will take them out of context and parse them in bad faith,” the planning body wrote in the report accompanying the bylaws.

Garber and Manning added that the new bylaws aimed not to reduce or duplicate any existing University or school functions.

While the draft bylaws included multiple standing committees, the new version includes only broad-strokes descriptions of committees for internal governance, specifying that they should not duplicate existing schools’ committees. The final bylaws also include regular “closed” sessions of the senate because they would be “indispensable for candid exchanges concerning a range of sensitive topics,” planning body members wrote in the report accompanying the bylaws.

The planning body made a few smaller changes to top Harvard officials’ involvement in the senate. The final bylaws give Harvard’s president the authority to disapprove an amendment brought after a two-thirds vote of serving senators.

The planning body also replaced the draft bylaws’ stipulation that the body’s executive committee “shall meet annually” with the Harvard Corporation and Board of Overseers, Harvard’s top governing bodies, with a softened proposal to “make efforts to meet annually” with the bodies.

The final bylaws sketch a senate more cautious than some of the planning body’s earliest proposals indicated. Months into the effort — precipitated by faculty concerns about Harvard’s leadership and governing boards — the planning body weighed the possibility of adding a faculty seat on the Corporation and giving the senate legislative responsibilities.

Still, many elements of the draft bylaws remained unchanged. The size of the senate — 43 members, with 12 allotted for the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and four for several other faculties — and length of senator terms remained consistent with the draft bylaws.

The final bylaws will be considered by all nine of the University’s faculties, including Harvard Business School — the only faculty not to send delegates to the planning body. Allen said the bylaws were submitted to the Faculty of Arts and Sciences’ Faculty Council on Thursday, with the aim of putting them to a vote in December.

If approved, the bylaws would be subject to a five-year review, which should include input from “faculty members, University leadership, and the Governing Boards.” The bylaws do not specify what action the senate could take in response to the review.

Harvard Law School professor Benjamin Eidelson, who represented the faculty planning body in discussions with Garber and Manning, wrote in an emailed statement that there were a “number of ways in which the final proposed bylaws are stronger than the version we started with.”

“I hope our colleagues across the university will engage with the report to really understand the rationales for the choices we made,” he added.

—Staff writer Abigail S. Gerstein can be reached at [email protected] and on Signal at abbysg.97. Follow her on X @abbysgerstein.

—Staff writer Amann S. Mahajan can be reached at [email protected] and on Signal at amannsm.38. Follow her on X @amannmahajan.