Faculty Senate Planning Group To Enter Negotiations with Central Administration, Pushing Timeline Further

Members of Harvard’s faculty senate planning body will enter formal negotiations with faculty appointed by the University’s top administrators, delaying the rollout of a long-anticipated University-wide faculty senate as they move to finalize its governing rules.

The eight-member working group — split evenly between representatives of the planning body and the Office of the President and Office of the Provost — will address outstanding concerns from University President Alan M. Garber ’76 and Provost John F. Manning ’82 about draft bylaws circulated to faculty last fall.

Those concerns centered on how the proposed senate would represent Harvard’s sprawling faculty and how it would fit into existing governance structures, according to a Tuesday report from the planning body.

The move marks a significant shift for a body that pushed for faculty autonomy amid a crisis of confidence in Harvard leadership. Now, as the process enters its final stretch, planning body delegates are leaning into a more explicitly collaborative model with Harvard’s central administration.

After a Feb. 24 meeting with Garber and Manning, the planning body voted overwhelmingly to delay submitting the bylaws — previously slated for a release this academic year — until the fall, according to the report. The senate’s projected launch in September 2027 remained unchanged.

The working group includes Government professor Daniel P. Carpenter, Economics professor Jason Furman ’92, Harvard Kennedy School professor Meghan L. O’Sullivan, and Harvard Law School professor Elizabeth P. Kamali ’97, representing Garber and Manning.

Harvard Medical School professor S. Robert Datta, HLS professor Benjamin Eidelson, Graduate School of Education professor Julie A. Reuben, and Harvard Divinity School professor David C. Lamberth will represent the faculty planning body.

In a statement shared with the planning body, Garber and Manning said they had “several questions” about the draft bylaws.

“We have several questions about the draft by-laws, including how to ensure that any faculty body represents a fair cross-section of the faculty and selects members with strong institutional experience and how the proposed body’s structures would intersect with existing governance structures,” they wrote in the Tuesday report.

They endorsed the working group as a vehicle for resolving those issues through “true collaborations” between faculty and leadership.

Harvard Graduate School of Education lecturer Timothy P. McCarthy ’93 and University professor Danielle S. Allen, who chair meetings of the planning body, did not clarify what would be under discussion — instead referring The Crimson back to Garber and Manning’s statement in the Tuesday report.

Planning body members also described the revisions as a culmination of prolonged research and exploration — including consulting with presidents, provosts, and deans at Duke University, the University of Chicago, and Stanford University — and said the final phase would focus on refining, rather than rethinking, the structure and purpose of the proposed senate.

In the Tuesday report, the delegates argued that their initial bylaws had failed to express their intentions to facilitate a “close partnership” with central administrators and their goal to be able “to provide a confidential advisory space to university leadership.”

“It had always been our intention to build a Senate that would have a strong partnership between the faculty and university leadership,” Allen said. “And we realized that the draft that we shared with the campus at the beginning of fall didn’t actually communicate that effectively.”

The planning body revised the draft bylaws to formally designate Garber and Manning as ex officio, non-voting members of the senate, according to the report.

The revisions also scrapped a nomination system for senate delegates, instead including all eligible faculty in schools’ candidate pools “to enable selection of widely respected colleagues who might never put themselves forward or even accept nomination.”

The latest delay extends a process that has been underway for nearly two years. Faculty leaders initially aimed to release draft bylaws by January 2025; those drafts did not emerge until October, and final approval has now been pushed to the fall under the new setup.

The proposal outlines a 43-member faculty senate that would serve in an advisory capacity to Harvard’s central administration and governing boards. It carries no formal legislative power, a more limited design than faculty senates at peer schools like Columbia University and Stanford.

As the effort has stretched on, new faculty groups have attempted to fill the governance vacuum. Among them are the Faculty Advisory Council — convened by Garber to advise top administrators — and a Harvard chapter of the American Association of University Professors, which took center stage in Harvard’s battle with the Trump administration.

Despite the shift to the planning body’s efforts, McCarthy still hailed what he said was a faculty-led approach to Harvard’s governance.

“The faculty senate is of the faculty, by the faculty and for the faculty,” he said. “It will serve that function, and that is the priority of any faculty governing body, and that’s certainly how we envision it.”

—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.