Renovating Harvard (and other Ivies)

The Case for Shared Governance Just Got a Lot Stronger

Democracy renovation begins at home, I often say. In my case, that means not only the state of Massachusetts but also Harvard University.

For more than two years, I’ve been working with many colleagues to establish a university-wide faculty senate at Harvard. We have made good progress and are (hopefully) in a final stage of design before it can be presented to faculty for consideration.

Two recent events at Ivy League institutions increase my confidence that renewed and healthy forms of shared governance could transform higher ed for the better: the recent vote of Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences to fight grade inflation by capping A grades and the recent report by Yale’s Committee on Trust in Higher Education.

Contrary to what many a politician might have people believe, faculty members are mostly not wild-eyed radicals. Mostly, we are nerds who love learning. Over the past 15 years, we have experienced our campuses as being swamped by a cultural tsunami, in the form of social media culture, washing in from outside. The key features of this fast-moving flood include: peer pressure and shaming; ideological purity tests; reductions in attention spans; a taste for meme wars instead of argument; and a mental health crisis among young people.

Truth is, we have been overwhelmed, and we haven’t liked it any more than anyone else has. This is a part of the higher ed story that people have by-and-large missed. Faculty themselves want change. We want the love of learning back.

Both actions — the vote at Harvard and the report at Yale — reflect that yearning. The Arts and Sciences faculty vote was decisive: 458 to 201. It came after many, many months of deliberations. (Harvard Arts and Sciences faculty meetings have not yet, for some reason, incorporated the lesson that successful deliberative bodies need to place time limits on speakers.) People on both sides of the issue spoke eloquently and with a good-faith motivation to do right by students. Significant evidence was introduced to the discussion. Potential unintended consequences and downstream effects were considered. The committee drafting the proposal listened and learned — and revised and improved what was on the table.

The Yale report is equally serious in its commitment to love of learning and fostering intellectual growth. In its pursuit of the sources of the distrust that many Americans now feel for universities, it honestly prioritized our biggest problems: cost; admissions; and speech, censorship, and intellectual pluralism.

Here, too, faculty brought all the rigor of earnest scholars to bear.

The cost problem, they determined, is made worse by the fact that leading private universities in fact are terrible at internal accounting. Yale, they reported, can’t even really say how much it spends on academic vs. administrative functions. (Yale is not alone in this limitation.) In other words, faculty assessed their institution and found that its failures flow from intellectual mistakes and weaknesses. That’s actually good news: The problems should be eminently correctable.

Admissions introduces similar concerns. No one knows how it works. We all deserve a transparent account and clear statement of threshold requirements for gaining entry to Yale, the report argues. The report writers don’t want this knowledge about admissions simply for knowledge’s sake. They recognize that baseline knowledge and facts about the process are necessary to anchor an experience of fairness. Again, it is the faculty’s own high standards and appreciation for intellectual clarity that support the precision of the Yale Committee’s diagnosis.

The Yale Committee reports much campus dissension on the subject of intellectual pluralism, yet here, too, an intellectual purpose shines through. They conclude that section by writing, “While such issues remain contested, nearly everyone we spoke to agreed on one thing: Echo chambers do not produce the best teaching, research, or scholarship.” The report offers multiple pathways to avoiding echo chambers on campus, all motivated by an overarching commitment to intellectual excellence.

The Harvard faculty vote and Yale report recommendations do not amount to earth-shattering amendments to campus practices. In many ways, they are quite modest, common-sense adjustments to secure a healthier intellectual environment for students and faculty alike. But here is one thing they do deliver emphatically: Proof that the faculty can be trusted.

Building shared governance where it scarcely or only partially exists (Harvard, Yale) and refashioning it at those places where it has gone off the rails can serve us well. We do have positive examples of healthy shared governance at Duke, Chicago, and Stanford. I’m sure there are other places too.

Now, with these two recent faculty actions, university leaders and faculty alike can have more confidence that investment in shared governance can pay dividends — as we act on our shared desire to serve a public that supports us in so many ways.