Seven New Members Elected to Board of Overseers, Six as Elected Directors

Seven alumni were elected Thursday to the Board of Overseers, Harvard’s second-highest governing body, replacing nearly a quarter of the Board’s membership and capping a months-long election process for Harvard’s alumni leadership bodies.

The Harvard Alumni Association also added six new elected directors.

Five of the elected Overseer candidates — technologist Arti Garg, entrepreneur Teresa H. Clarke ’84, former California Surgeon General Nadine Burke Harris, former Mexican Supreme Court justice Alfredo Gutiérrez Ortiz Mena, and architecture executive Philip L. Harrison ’86 — will serve full six-year terms on the Board.

Salvo Arena, the mergers and acquisitions lawyer, finished sixth in the election and will serve the three-year remainder of current Board president Sylvia Mathews Burwell, who was elevated to the Harvard Corporation in March. YoungArts chief executive officer Clive Chang, who finished seventh, will serve the final two years of former Overseer Vikas Sukhatme’s term.

Only 32,867 alumni voted in the election, just over eight percent of the more than 400,000 eligible. The low turnout is typical for alumni elections. Last year’s cycle saw roughly similar figures.

The election also marked another sweeping victory for the Coalition for a Diverse Harvard, an alumni network that champions diversity and inclusion. All six candidates the group endorsed in March won seats on the Board, the third consecutive year that the alumni group’s chosen slate has swept the elections.

All of the elected candidates said in interviews with The Crimson that they would be stewards of Harvard’s long-term, institutional values during a period of upheaval for the University.

Four of the seven elected candidates — Chang, Arena, Harrison, and Burke Harris — touted the values of diversity and inclusion even as the federal government campaigns against such initiatives on college campuses.

Arena called diversity, equity, and inclusion critical to the University’s mission, and highlighted the role of international students in particular.

“Harvard has — in its DNA has — an international component, international alums, and international students. They make Harvard a better place, a more diverse place. They need to be there,” he said.

Burke Harris described diversity and equity as “very positive things” and said Harvard could continue to advance those substantive values, even as she acknowledged political pushback surrounding the language.

Chang and Harrison were more openly critical of the University’s recent moves on diversity-related issues.

Harrison called Harvard’s decision to limit alumni interviewers’ ability to discuss race in their write-ups as “a step backwards.” And Chang said the closure of Harvard College’s diversity offices last summer was “disappointing.”

Garg, the chief technologist at industrial software company AVEVA, and Clarke, who founded africa.com after a two-decade long run at Goldman Sachs, hewed closer to the institutional line, running on platforms of revitalizing open inquiry and civil discourse on campus.

Clarke was especially adamant that the University should recenter its academic mission, calling the last two years a period of “internal reflection.”

Ortiz Mena, by contrast, did not publicly commit himself to a forceful platform. He campaigned, instead, on clearly defining the scope of the Overseers’ role to maintain public trust. Ortiz Mena offered a restrained view of the Board’s mandate, describing the Overseers as advisers instead of managers.

Allison Charney Epstein ’89, Mia Esther Alpert ’99, Jeffrey H. Tignor ’96, James P. “Jimmy” Biblarz ’14, Medha Gargeya ’14, and David G. Lefer ’93 were elected to three-year terms as Harvard Alumni Association Elected Directors.

The newly-elected Overseers will join the Board on May 29, and the elected directors will take their seats on July 1.

—Staff writer Hugo C. Chiasson can be reached at [email protected] or on Signal at hcc.35. Follow him on X @HugoChiassonn.

—Staff writer Elise A. Spenner can be reached at [email protected] or on Signal at elisespenner.82. Follow her on X @EliseSpenner.