Harvard Corporation Member Defends Selection Process, Touts Closer Ties With Overseers

Harvard Corporation member Mariano-Florentino “Tino” Cuéllar ’93 said Wednesday that he and his colleagues had increased their collaboration with the alumni-elected Board of Overseers in a bid to make the University’s top governing body less insular.

Cuéllar’s remarks, made during an appearance on Harvard College Dean David J. Deming’s new podcast, offer a rare glimpse at how the governing body is working to modernize in the face of longstanding criticism that it is outdated and unaccountable.

In a notable exchange, Deming directly asked Cuéllar to defend the Corporation’s selection process, observing that the governing body is often criticized for selecting its own members.

Though the Board of Overseers must sign off on new members, there is no formal mechanism for how they are selected. The Corporation’s 12-person board also skews heavily toward industry titans, top financiers, and higher education leaders.

“I’ve heard some people feel that it makes Harvard University less accountable,” Deming said. “What would you say to people who say that?”

But even as he acknowledged the question was “fair to ask” — saying that the Corporation came from “some combination of the way Harvard has operated for hundreds of years and even maybe the Massachusetts Constitution” — Cuéllar largely defended its selection process.

“How do you make a system like that serve Harvard and its goals as best you can?” Cuéller said. “That to me, augurs in favor of listening, taking great care in those appointments, consultation, leveraging membership of the Board of Overseers.”

Cuéllar, a former California Supreme Court justice, compared the selection of Corporation members to the court, arguing that institutions need to balance to be responsive to the moment while also insulated from rapidly-changing public opinion.

“As with the Harvard governance structure, there’s an effort there in California to strike a balance between — how do you not make this be a least common denominator process of just ‘What does the public think about the latest decision?’ and then pressure comes. But instead to create some responsiveness but also some insulation.”

Cuéllar also referenced a series of structural reforms implemented by then-Harvard President Drew G. Faust in 2010 that expanded the governing body to 13 members and restricted each member to two six-year terms.

Cuéllar said those reforms brought the Overseers — the larger, alumni-elected body that holds only advisory power — into more conversations.

“A really key element of that was getting the Board of Overseers and the Corporation to work more frequently together on a set of issues,” Cuéllar said.

“Just as one example, routinely in meetings over the weekend, the Overseers are here, the Corporation is here, we work together, we talk to each other, we hear the same sessions,” he added. “So that is part of the story.”

Cuéllar’s comments follow years of effort by the Corporation to rebuild public trust after the catastrophic end to Claudine Gay’s presidency — a scandal many affiliates pinned on the two governing bodies.

In 2024, members of the Corporation made an unprecedented appearance before Harvard’s faculty for a town hall and offered a rare mea culpa for governance missteps.

Senior Fellow Penny S. Pritzker ’81 told The Crimson in May that the Corporation continued to meet with faculty and top affiliates at events over the past two years, arguing in a statement that the Corporation had “taken steps to increase the volume and depth of our engagement.”

Pritzker also convened a committee to review and recommend reforms to the presidential search process in the aftermath of Gay’s presidency, though the group did not publicly release its findings.

Cuéllar described the Corporation on Wednesday as a “curator” and a “nexus of different networks.” He said the governing body had the difficult task of making “judgement calls” about a complex institution.

“That requires some real care, to make sure we listen and get the information that we need to help Alan and help this community try to get to the right place — but at the same time recognizing that there’s also risk of paralysis by analysis,” Cuellar said.

He said he and his fellow Corporation members tried to approach their job with “humility and care,” but admitted it wasn’t always easy to convey that.

“I think it’s hard to see that because sometimes what you got to do in any board is to have kind of an executive session and just talk quietly about hard choices that an institution has,” Cuéllar said.

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