FAS Should Fix the Faculty Senate

After spending months working with top administrators, an elected faculty committee has released updated bylaws for Harvard’s first faculty senate. As members of the ad hoc group that helped create that committee, known as the Senate Planning Body, we are grateful to our colleagues who worked to bring Harvard, long an outlier in its lack of a central organ for faculty voice, toward alignment with peer institutions.

But we fear they propose a senate lacking sufficient efficacy and independence. Fortunately, tailored amendments can address these issues.

Academics know the best ideas emerge when peers bring independent perspectives to bear on hard questions from a footing of mutual respect. This is our profession’s core premise and the central idea of shared university governance, which treats trustees, administrators, and faculty as three legs of a stool collaboratively supporting higher education.

Lately, Harvard’s stool has been shaky. The Harvard Corporation, our analog for trustees, ousted University President Claudine Gay six months into her term, notwithstanding a statement from over 700 faculty urging them not to. It also approved controversial restrictions on campus protest and empowered the president to select which faculty judge certain student discipline cases — stripping faculty of autonomy.

As university boards go, the Corporation is unusually powerful and insulated. Its broadly self-selecting members operate secretly and effectively answer to no one. Meanwhile, our administrative officers — the president, provost, and deans — are appointed directly or indirectly by the Corporation, which, as Gay’s ouster shows, can also push them out.

Against this backdrop, independent faculty voice is crucial. To enable it, a faculty senate needs some degree of autonomy from Corporation-appointed officers.

It also needs to be effective. For a purely advisory senate, as Harvard’s will be, this means it must be able to formulate and share advice — with Harvard’s administrators, boards, faculties, and community. To do that, it must be able to do what faculty do best: study important questions, deliberate on solutions, and share conclusions.

The planning body’s bylaws limit this potential in four compounding — but correctable — ways.

First, they prohibit the senate from forming committees to address questions beyond its own “internal governance” and further bar those committees from studying matters within the “remit of other University-wide committees or bodies.” The senate, in other words, is discouraged from using committees — the workhorses of deliberative bodies. Instead, the bylaws allow it to form only “ad hoc working groups” that presumptively expire after six months.

Second, the bylaws make Harvard’s president, provost, and deans (the Academic Council) ex officio members with a right to attend any “closed sessions.” They contain no provision for senators to deliberate without these administrators present. But as the planning body writes (quoting the Supreme Court), officials deliberating in front of others often “temper candor with a concern for appearances and for their own interests to the detriment of the decisionmaking process.” The Corporation and Academic Council deliberate privately, without faculty presence, as a matter of course. Under the proposed bylaws, the senate would not enjoy such independence.

Third, the bylaws bar the senate from sharing its views on any “matter of substantial concern to the University community” absent a vote by two-thirds of currently serving senators. We know of no other faculty senate that imposes a two-thirds majority requirement.

Even the United States Senate, frequently criticized for paralysis, adopts measures that clear its sixty-vote filibuster — a threshold lower than the bylaws would apply to our senate’s purely advisory resolutions. The bylaws already have provisions to ensure senators are representative of their peers and separately prohibit resolutions on issues beyond the University’s core mission. A representative, advisory body with this tailored remit should be allowed to express its considered views by simple majority.

Fourth, the bylaws freeze this senate in amber by barring it from amending its bylaws without the assent of the University president. This insurmountable veto power is to our knowledge unprecedented among university senates. It is also unwise. As the planning body observes, this senate is “novel,” which means “the Senate will have much better information in a few years’ time than we do now” about how to structure itself. Those future questions should be resolved by senators representing the entities that set this historic experiment in motion: Harvard’s faculties.

The most limiting aspects of the proposed bylaws — including the restrictions on standing committees, the preclusion of independent deliberation, and the presidential veto — were not in the planning body’s initial proposal, emerging only after representatives began negotiating with Garber and Manning. Harvard’s president and Corporation already hold unilateral control over the University’s governing statutes, while a separate bylaws provision prohibits the senate from proposing amendments to change its advisory nature. In this context, barring the senate from adjusting its own structure consigns it to a permanently subordinate role incompatible with a partnership predicated on mutual respect.

Fortunately, surgical amendments could redress the issues we’ve described — and turn back toward the draft bylaws that were initially circulated. The Faculty of Arts and Sciences has robust rules of procedure that facilitate amendments, and a history of using them to improve proposals under consideration. That faculty set in motion the process that created the planning body. It can lead again now by sending its sister faculties revised senate bylaws that meet the moment.

Mina Cikara is the Fredric Wertham Professor of Law and Psychiatry in Society. Ryan D. Enos is a professor of Government. Kirsten A. Weld is a professor of History.