Two weeks ago, roughly sixteen hours before commencement exercises at Harvard University were set to begin, the institution’s governing board, known as the Harvard Corporation, rejected the list of undergraduate degree candidates put forward by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. In its place, the corporation adopted a list that omitted thirteen graduating seniors. Each of those students had met all the academic requirements to graduate. But a few weeks earlier, they had also each participated in a pro-Palestine encampment in Harvard Yard. For that reason, the corporation refused to grant them the degrees their teachers had voted to confer.
During commencement, student orators decried the corporation’s decision from the stage. Then, as Interim President Alan M. Garber began to speak the words that would confer degrees upon the incomplete graduating class, more than 1,000 students, parents, and professors stood up, turned their backs on Garber and on the corporation members seated with him on the dais, and left. Exiting the Yard and spilling out onto Massachusetts Avenue, they chanted, “Let them walk! Let them walk!”
But walk those thirteen students did not. Because in the end, as not just this week but this academic year made clear, it is the corporation — a self-appointed board composed primarily of business leaders who have never worked in higher education — that runs the most important aspects of the most prominent university in the world.
The publicity-shy corporation had made international headlines a few months prior, in January, when it deposed the university’s then president, Claudine Gay, in the face of massive political pressure from Republicans in Congress, wealthy donors, and racist antagonists. Three months before that, Gay had been inaugurated as the school’s first nonwhite leader. Notably, the corporation removed her shortly after more than 700 members of the Harvard faculty had implored it not to do so. According to The New York Times, those faculty voices were outweighed when the corporation’s members “flew to ski towns and beaches for the holidays,” where “criticism by others in their wealthy circles” ultimately led them to conclude that “the best path forward for Harvard was without Dr. Gay in the president’s chair.”
Gay’s ouster shook Harvard to its foundations. But in the fullness of time, it will likely be the corporation’s second controversial decision of 2024 — its overriding of the faculty’s judgment with respect to the conferral of degrees — that will be the more significant one for higher education. Because it was in this vote that the corporation arrogated to itself the power to make, against the will of the faculty, the core academic decisions of the institution. And with that wall now breached, there’s no telling what future academic decisions, from the courses the university offers to the people it hires to teach them, the corporation may see fit to render — or how it will make them when confronted with pressures equal to or greater than those to which it has already bowed.
To fully appreciate the ramifications of this historic decision, it is important to understand precisely what happened, what faculty members did in response, and how the corporation purported to justify itself.
On April 24, a few days after mass arrests of students at Columbia University shook campuses nationwide and one day after Harvard administrators disbanded the only recognized pro-Palestinian undergraduate-student group on campus, students from across the university established an encampment in Harvard Yard.
This was hardly the first time students had protested in this way. In 1986, student protesters set up an anti-apartheid encampment in the Yard that remained in place through commencement ceremonies. In 2001, dozens of students demanding a living wage for university employees occupied the president’s offices for weeks, while fellow protesters erected over 100 tents outside. In 2011, hundreds of students set up camp as part of the Occupy movement. And again in 2015, students with Divest Harvard, advocating fossil fuel divestment, organized a weeklong occupation and blockade of multiple campus offices, including once again the president’s office in the Yard.
As public life beyond the university has made all too clear of late, norms, once broken, are not so easily repaired.
Then and now, these encampments conformed to the university’s core policies and principles regarding protest, as codified in Harvard’s University-Wide Statement on Rights and Responsibilities. Promulgated by vote of the corporation in 1970 and reaffirmed by subsequent votes in 1977 and 2002, it affirms that “reasoned dissent plays a particularly vital part in [Harvard’s] existence.” Accordingly, the statement continues (emphases ours): “All members of the university have the right to press for action on matters of concern by any appropriate means.” The university, meanwhile, “must affirm, assure and protect the rights of its members to organize and join political associations, convene and conduct public meetings, publicly demonstrate and picket in orderly fashion, advocate and publicize opinion by print, sign, and voice.”
Notably, “any unauthorized occupation of a university building” constitutes a “violation of the statement.” But open spaces — like Harvard Yard — are treated differently. This point was confirmed as recently as January, when the interim president and the university’s fifteen deans issued updated “Guidance on Protest and Dissent.” As that message made clear, “Because free speech is of fundamental importance, schools should take steps to have venues for protest, dissent, and the like in courtyards, quadrangles, and other such spaces” (emphasis ours).
As a peaceful protest in a public quadrangle, similar in scope to numerous others over nearly four decades, the students’ encampment was in line with Harvard’s past practices and with the policies adopted by its governing boards. It did, however, contravene words printed on a set of signs hastily affixed to the gates of the Yard shortly after Columbia’s encampment began. According to those signs, “structures, including tents and tables, are not permitted in the Yard without prior permission” and “students violating these policies are subject to disciplinary action.” The signs did not specify or cite the “policies” they referenced, nor did any university official explain how the signs’ newly announced prohibition on protest encampments came into being, by whose authority, or how it might relate to the University-Wide Statement, the Guidance on Protest and Dissent, or the decades of prior precedent.
Soon after establishing their encampment, the students contacted Interim President Garber in hopes of opening a dialogue about the concerns driving their protest. In so doing, they invited the administration to act in accordance with the University-Wide Statement on Rights and Responsibilities, which says that “it is the responsibility of officers of administration and instruction to be alert to the needs of the university community; to give full and fair hearing to reasoned expressions of grievances; and to respond promptly and in good faith to such expressions and to widely expressed needs for change” (emphasis ours).
But university leaders refused to meet or otherwise engage with the students for nearly two weeks. Instead, they attempted to force an end to the protest through a two-pronged disciplinary strategy. First, the university initiated disciplinary proceedings, referring individuals suspected of being associated with the encampment to local disciplinary bodies known as administrative boards or ad boards in the various professional, graduate, and undergraduate schools. These Ad Boards charged students with, among other things, violating the prohibition on camping described in the signs on the gates. Second, invoking a mechanism typically reserved for individuals posing an immediate threat to themselves or to campus safety, Garber announced that the protesting students would be placed on immediate involuntary leave, stripping them of active enrollment status without hearings or fact finding. The unusual application of involuntary leave, in particular, alarmed faculty, some 300 of whom signed a terse letter to Garber urging him to meet with the students and “engage in meaningful dialogue.”
To his credit, Garber changed course, opening talks with the students that ultimately proved successful. As he reported to the broader community, the students “agreed to end the encampment” in exchange for “a meeting with the chair of the Corporation Committee on Shareholder Responsibility and other university officials to address questions about the endowment.” And critically, on the question of discipline, according to an email published by The Harvard Crimson, Garber privately committed to the students that he would “encourage the administrative boards or other disciplinary bodies within the schools to address cases expeditiously under existing precedent and practice (including taking into account where relevant the voluntary decision to leave the encampment), for all students, including those students eligible thereafter to graduate so that they may do so.”
The students upheld their end of the bargain: The tents came down. For its part, the university promptly reinstated students placed on involuntary leave. And in accordance with Garber’s assurances, none of the ad boards across Harvard’s various schools applied disciplinary sanctions that prevented any of their eligible students from graduating.
Except for the administrative board at Harvard College. On the evening of Friday, May 17, days before commencement, that board issued provisional notifications to 23 undergraduates, including thirteen seniors set to graduate, informing them that on Monday, May 20, they would formally receive disciplinary sanctions — in most cases, one or two terms of probation — that would remove them from “good standing” for the duration of the sanction. The upshot, per a provision in the Harvard College Student Handbook making degree conferral contingent upon good standing, was that the university would withhold degrees from these thirteen seniors for nearly a year, and in some cases longer. Thirteen lives upended, just like that.
May 20 was also the day that the Faculty of Arts and Sciences was scheduled to vote on the conferral of undergraduate degrees, as it does every year. That degree meeting is usually a sleepy, pro forma affair. It is exempt from the quorum requirements applicable to other faculty meetings, and no business beyond approving the lists of degree candidates is permitted. Still, the meeting, culminating in a formal vote, is a fundamental element of faculty governance. It is the mechanism by which the faculty conveys to the university’s governing boards those people it affirms have met the requirements for degrees and who thus deserve to be graduates of Harvard University.
That formal vote has long been understood to represent a core academic decision firmly within the purview of a university’s faculty. As the American Association of University Professors wrote in its landmark 1966 statement on university governance: “The faculty sets the requirements for the degrees offered in course, determines when the requirements have been met, and authorizes the president and board to grant the degrees thus achieved.” Harvard’s own governing statutes echo this principle. The “ordinary degrees” of the university, they state, are conferred “by vote of the corporation” only after and upon the “recommendation by the several faculties.”
And so, on the afternoon of Monday, May 20, when the faculty filed into the degree meeting to perform one of its most important duties, the assembled professors faced a choice: vote to endorse the ad board’s list of proposed degree candidates, which omitted the thirteen seniors, or vote to amend that list and restore them.
An unusually high number of faculty members turned out. When the dean of Harvard College rose to present the list of degree candidates for the faculty’s approval, one professor rose to offer an amendment. He began by citing the university statutes that detail the faculty’s authority and obligations. Quoting them, he observed that the statutes vest in the “several faculties” the sole authority “to inflict, at their discretion, all proper means of discipline,” that they place the administrative board under “the authority of the faculty from which its powers have been delegated,” that they place the academic and administrative policies of Harvard College “under the immediate charge of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences,” and that they call upon the faculty alone to decide whom to recommend for the “ordinary degrees” of the university.
Now, Harvard College’s student handbook does state that students on academic probation may not receive their degrees. But, as noted by those in attendance at the meeting and communicated in writing to senior administrators shortly afterward, that handbook had itself been written by the faculty and adopted by faculty vote at a prior meeting. This made it subject to the superseding authority of the faculty to define, revise, or temporarily override the academic policies of the school under their “immediate charge.” And after deliberation, by an overwhelming vote, the faculty decided to do precisely that — not to overturn or void the disciplinary sanctions, which would have been beyond the scope of permissible business at the degree conferral meeting in any event, but simply to override the application of the contrary handbook provision in the course of granting degrees to these thirteen students.
“Whereas other faculties of Harvard University do not appear to have taken actions to prevent the graduation of any of their students,” the faculty amendment detailed, and “whereas the Faculty of Arts and Sciences agrees with the interim president that it is in the interest of Harvard University, and consistent with past precedents, that all students” who had participated in the protests and were “otherwise eligible to graduate be permitted to do so,” the degree list was formally “amended, notwithstanding any extant policies or provisions to the contrary, to add” back in the missing names. And with that, the meeting adjourned.
Walking out of the meeting, the professors would reasonably have assumed they had put the matter to rest. Few imagined the corporation would take the unprecedented step of overruling them on an issue so clearly within their core academic competency and statutory authority. Such a move, one professor told the Boston Globe, would be “extraordinary.”
And it was. Barely 48 hours later, the corporation rejected the faculty’s degree list. As always, its deliberations and vote were secret, though at least one member of the corporation — Garber — distanced himself from the decision through a spokesperson, who said, “It’s up to the corporation and not Interim President Garber as to what happens with these students.”
The corporation’s brief public explanation of its decision opened with a misleading statement: “In accordance with the university statutes, the President and Fellows of Harvard College are responsible for conferring degrees on students who have fulfilled degree requirements and are in good standing.” Critically, the words “good standing” do not appear anywhere in the cited statutes (which Harvard unfortunately does not make public, though we have seen a copy). The statutes’ sole reference to degrees says only that they “are conferred, after recommendation by the several faculties, by vote of the corporation, with the consent of the overseers.” The requirement of good standing exists only in the student handbook — which according to the very statutes the corporation cited, the faculty has the sole power to author and amend, in exercise of its “powers relating to ordinary matters of administration and discipline” in a school placed “under the immediate charge of the faculty.”
The corporation, in other words, took an academic policy adopted and, in this instance, overridden by the faculty and pretended it was a statutory limitation on the faculty’s own authority. It then wielded that invented limitation to overrule the faculty on one of the most basic academic decisions a university can make.
In this key respect, the corporation’s decision was fundamentally distinct from the removal of Claudine Gay. In both instances, the corporation could have chosen to engage with its faculty on an essential question concerning the university. In both instances, it could have defended its faculty’s views and the institution’s mission against a barrage of external political pressure. In both instances, it chose to do none of this. But only in rejecting the degree list did the corporation clearly transgress the bounds of its legitimate authority in a system of shared university governance. For while, to quote once more the AAUP, the “governing boards have the legal responsibility for selection of a president,” the “faculty sets the requirements for the degrees” and “determines when the requirements have been met,” prerogatives that flow from its “primary responsibility for … those aspects of student life which relate to the educational process.”
That slippage — the corporation’s move in a span of months from saying “we dismiss the president” to saying “we choose who gets degrees” — revealed just how sweepingly this unelected, self-appointed body envisions its own power and prerogative.
All of which raises the essential question: What other elements of faculty governance might the corporation, in time, deem its own? For decades, as the AAUP’s 1966 statement attested, it has been a core tenet of American higher education that the “faculty has primary responsibility for such fundamental areas as curriculum, subject matter and methods of instruction, research, [and] faculty status,” including “appointments, reappointments, decisions not to reappoint, promotions, the granting of tenure, and dismissal.” Yet in recent years, the same political-pressure campaign demanding that universities crack down on student protesters has been leveled against these other pillars of higher education as well. As the AAUP and PEN America report, legislatures in 20 states have tried “to prohibit or impede the teaching and education of students concerning what are termed ‘divisive concepts,’” a euphemism for “discussions of racism and related issues in American history.” At the same time, universities have been pushed not to hire or promote certain professors and to discipline others.
We know how the Harvard Corporation acted, against the will of its faculty, when these forces came for our president. We know how it acted, against the will of its faculty, when they came for our students. Will this same corporation stand for its faculty when our own academic freedoms to teach, write, or speak in public are under assault?
After all, the same university statutes that the corporation cited to overrule the faculty on the conferral of degrees say that, “as specified from time to time by the corporation with the consent of the overseers, appointments shall require the approval of the corporation.” Likewise, the university’s centuries-old charter assigns the corporation the “pleasure of removing all inferior officers,” including professors, and gives it “power and authority” to “be the immediate governors” of the university.
Striking the right balance in a university’s governance is not a new problem, of course. Harvard President Charles Eliot observed in 1907 that it was common then to see “barbarous boards exercise an arbitrary power of dismissal” of university professors, to see them “exclude from the teachings of the university unpopular or dangerous subjects,” and to see them “fail to treat the members of the teaching staff with that high consideration to which their functions entitle them.” It took a century’s worth of work, by the AAUP and others, to build a fundamentally different set of norms — one in which, to quote the AAUP’s landmark statement, “members of a faculty are the appointees, but not in any proper sense the employees, of the trustees; they are partners with the trustees.”
But the framework of partnership inherited from the twentieth century’s reforms rests on just that. Norms. And as public life beyond the university has made all too clear of late, norms, once broken, are not so easily repaired. Indeed, they may only continue to deteriorate.
Many of the problems described here will be deeply familiar to colleagues at public institutions. What Kevin McClure and Barrett Taylor describe as “the hollowing-out of higher education” — a yearslong legislative assault that has gutted tenure protections, targeted diversity and equity initiatives, interfered in personnel matters, eroded academic freedom and free expression, and undermined curricular autonomy — has grievously damaged even some of the country’s most robust state universities, and outright ruined some of the more vulnerable.
Faculty at well-resourced private universities might have imagined themselves insulated from such dynamics, shielded by their institutions’ endowments or pedigrees from meddling state legislatures and crusading right-wing politicians. But the tumult of the past year shows this to be an illusion. Under the auspices of a congressional investigation into Harvard’s “plague of antisemitism,” the House Committee on Education and the Workforce has subpoenaed thousands of pages of documents, threatened to hold Garber and other top administrators in contempt of Congress, and warned that failure to heed the committee’s whims will imperil the university’s access to federal funds, which account for approximately one-eighth of its total revenue and 66 percent of its research funding.
Alarmingly, it is clear that the call is also coming from inside the house. Alumni like Elise Stefanik, who graduated in 2006, and Bill Ackman, who graduated in 1988, led the attacks on Gay. Other deep-pocketed donors have replaced a storied philanthropic ethic with the hedge funder’s hostile-takeover mentality, threatening a capital rebellion if their demands for running the university are not met. Kenneth C. Griffin, for example, the billionaire namesake of the newly rechristened Harvard Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, suspended his donations over the university’s handling of antisemitism, urging a renewed emphasis on “Western values” to correct a student body “lost in the wilderness of microaggressions.” If endowments and prestige can be said to offer any protection against such attacks, it must be noted that they also introduce unique vulnerabilities.
And then there is the corporation. “When ignorance or ill will threatens the institution or any part of it,” the AAUP’s seminal statement warns, “the governing board must be available for support. In grave crises it will be expected to serve as a champion.” Yet at Harvard, the corporation has capitulated time and again, surrendering first Gay and then our students to the forces of ignorance and ill will amassing at the gates.
Many on our campus have been mystified to see the attacks of the past year pass almost without comment from those charged with guiding the institution through such crises. With the corporation unprepared or unwilling to champion the core mission and principles of higher education, other institutions and stakeholders are reminded of their own responsibility to meet the moment. As we write, some faculty at Harvard — like others across the country — are working to do precisely that. One initiative, unfolding across Harvard’s schools, aims to lay the groundwork for a university-wide faculty senate, the absence of which makes Harvard an outlier among its peer institutions. Another effort will see the creation, this summer, of a Harvard chapter of the AAUP, where instructors at all ranks — from graduate teachers and tenure-line faculty to lecturers and postdocs — can collaborate to bolster academic freedom and shared governance.
These interventions alone will not be enough, especially if the corporation continues to work at cross purposes with its faculty. But our students — whether or not they crossed the stage this spring, and all those who will cross it in the years to come — deserve at least this much. So, too, does our university.