The Faculty Are the Problem, Apparently

Last week, The Crimson revealed a large-scale fundraising campaign by senior administrators intended to transform the ideological makeup of Harvard’s faculty, ostensibly to provide “viewpoint diversity.” Per this plan, some 20 to 30 new professors could be appointed “at the University level” — which suggests, not by field experts at the department level, a sharp departure from the normal course of faculty appointments — and “embedded across schools and departments,” in an apparent attempt to dilute our professoriate’s purported liberal bias.

Amid a hiring freeze and a hurried retreat from almost everything that smacks of affirmative action or DEI, what could explain the University’s eagerness to embrace one, and only one, special form of diversity?

Fundamentally, this hiring push is part of a broader effort to diminish the authority and autonomy of the faculty. It would weaken a robust tradition of peer review and increase administrative control over University affairs.

Recent evidence suggests that Harvard’s upper administration sees its own faculty as a problem that needs to be solved. In December, University President Alan M. Garber ’76 blamed faculty activism — not the Trump administration’s lawsuits and attacks, not the doxxing of students, and not the numerous other reasons previously raised by the professoriate — for having chilled free speech on campus.

What’s more, our leadership has remained conspicuously silent when faculty members — disproportionately women and faculty of color — have had their scholarship and qualifications impugned by members of Congress and by right-wing outlets like Fox News and the Washington Free Beacon, who comb Harvard’s websites for syllabi and recorded talks to spin into hit pieces.

Harvard could have responded with statements standing behind the world-class research and teaching of its faculty — or, at a minimum, expressing chagrin that faculty are being targeted. It has been deeply demoralizing to see that our employer will not say a word to defend our work or integrity from such attacks.

Most offensively, Harvard’s top brass has strongly implied, in a series of personnel decisions and in court, that a not insignificant number of its own professors are antisemites, with zero factual basis to support the smear. Consider a brief Harvard filed last week, which referred to the disciplining of the faculty who participated in a 2024 protest in Widener Library — one that made no mention of Israel, Palestine, or any issues other than free speech — as part of “actions it had taken to address antisemitism.”

Influential actors aiming to reshape the university, likely including individuals who are being courted to pay the $10 million apiece to endow the “viewpoint diversity” professorships, are likewise leery of the academic experts who lead Harvard’s research and teaching. Sam Lessin, an alumnus and venture capitalist who founded the 1636 Forum after his failed 2023 campaign to join the Board of Overseers, told The New Yorker that he, in the words of the journalist Nathan Heller, “shares a widespread donor view that, at a moment when universities have become large and growth-oriented, more like companies, scholars are the wrong people to guide their trajectories.”

Starting from the premise that the faculty are the problem leads directly to a certain type of solution, examples of which are already on display.

One might more heavily exercise the provostial and presidential prerogative to overturn tenure recommendations made at the departmental or school level, as has been the case in FAS over the last decade, undermining faculty labor, mentorship, and scholarly expertise.

One might quietly have the Corporation and Overseers strip individual schools’ authority over student discipline, as occurred last year when the University announced that it would centralize discipline cases under the University Committee on Rights and Responsibilities.

And while it is true that faculty committees still carry out significant work for the University, the professors chosen to serve on those committees are hand-selected by deans rather than by lottery or a vote of peers. What is represented in these efforts is not “the faculty” as such, but rather a subset of the faculty filtered through the sieve of administrative approval.

All of this undermines the principle of shared governance, which has been a cornerstone of academic life since 1966, when it was first enshrined in the American Association of University Professors’s ​​Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities. As its name suggests, the principle holds that responsibility for managing university affairs must properly and meaningfully be shared among trustees, administrators, and faculty. It is precisely the joint nature of this enterprise that, among other things, marshals a crucial form of “viewpoint diversity” — one unmentioned by its self-styled champions — for the good of the institution.

But those who want to diminish the faculty’s decision-making authority, or who think universities should be run more like companies, should be careful what they wish for.

Since 1980, the Supreme Court’s interpretation of federal labor law has considered faculty at private universities to be managers rather than employees, and thus ineligible to unionize. But in the nearly fifty years since that ruling, National Labor Relations Board v. Yeshiva University, universities have transformed: the administrative class has ballooned, and boards of trustees have increasingly acted unilaterally, as seen in the “deals” struck between Trump and several of our peer institutions.

Given the degradation of shared governance, labor law experts like Yale Law School professor Michael J. Wishnie argue that if the Yeshiva framework were applied today, faculty in private universities would be deemed not “managerial” employees at all, but covered employees under the National Labor Relations Act — complete with the right to form unions.

Most Harvard faculty do not seek an adversarial relationship with their employer. Will that change if our administration continues to treat the faculty as adversaries?

Kirsten A. Weld is a professor of History and is the president of the AAUP-Harvard Faculty Chapter.