Garber, Corporation Members to Hold Town Hall with Harvard Faculty

Interim Harvard President Alan M. Garber ’76 and members of the Harvard Corporation will hold a town hall with faculty members in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, FAS Dean Hopi E. Hoekstra announced in a Tuesday meeting.

The town hall, which has not yet been scheduled, presents a rare chance for faculty to interface with members of the secretive Corporation, the University’s highest governing body.

Last month, the Faculty Council — a 19-member body that recommends legislation to the FAS — held a question-and-answer session with Garber and Fellows of the Corporation, as the board’s members are formally known. Online notices of Faculty Council proceedings stretching back to 2010 do not mention any other meetings between the Council and members of the Corporation.

But the crisis that has faced Harvard since Oct. 7 — inviting federal investigations, congressional subpoenas, and the end of the shortest presidential tenure in Harvard’s history — has pushed the Corporation into the spotlight over its handling of public pressure and campus divisions.

In December, four faculty — all leaders of the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard — met two Corporation members over dinner to discuss their concerns around free speech and civil discourse at the University. The widely-reported dinner did not directly address former Harvard President Claudine Gay’s embattled tenure, but its aftermath foregrounded questions about the Corporation’s haphazard leadership.

In a Jan. 3 op-ed in The Crimson, former Harvard Medical School Dean Jeffrey S. Flier — who attended the dinner — criticized what he called the Corporation’s “hands-off approach to governance” and urged the group to commit to “more active engagement” with Harvard affiliates and the public.

“Harvard is facing an unprecedented crisis in confidence, and responsibility for Harvard’s performance ultimately falls on the Corporation,” Flier wrote.

The recent tensions underscore long-standing frustration among some faculty with what they see as the Corporation’s insularity.

Philosophy professor Edward J. Hall wrote in a statement to The Crimson that the relationship between faculty and the Corporation is “inadequate,” characterized by a dearth of confidence and “no clear channels of communication.”

“Faculty (within FAS, at least) have no confidence that the members of the Corporation have any understanding of the issues that we deem most urgent, let alone whcy we deem them urgent,” Hall wrote.

Those concerns, Hall wrote, include a governance structure that “tends to limit and even marginalize faculty input,” as well as “threats to academic freedom coming from outside political pressure.”

Hall, a CAFH co-president, was not in attendance at the December dinner.

In an emailed statement, Computer Science professor and former Harvard College Dean Harry R. Lewis ’68 pointed to a 2009 op-ed he wrote for the Boston Globe.

“It is too small, too closed, and too secretive to be intensely self-critical, as any responsible board must be,” Lewis and his fellow SEAS professor Frederick H. Abernathy wrote in the op-ed.

None of his comments on the Corporation are “less true today” than they were 15 years ago, Lewis wrote to The Crimson.

—Staff writer Tilly R. Robinson can be reached at tilly.robinson@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @tillyrobin.