At Harvard, concept of faculty senate stirs debate

Harvard University students, professors, and others are debating whether the school should create a university-wide faculty group to represent a broad range of professors, given some bitter feelings about the disproportionate role the Faculty of Arts and Sciences played in toppling president Lawrence H. Summers.

A university-wide group, akin to what Stanford and other major universities have had for years, could have eased campus tensions and maybe even have saved the president's job, say some professors, students, and higher education specialists.

''It might have helped Larry Summers" to have such a group, said Gary Orfield, a professor in the Graduate School of Education. ''The university has a lot of diverse viewpoints. The more the merrier, the better you're going to understand what the real problems are."

Schools including business and law appeared to have more Summers supporters, indicating a division among professors over whether the president's style was good for Harvard's future.

The Crimson, Harvard's undergraduate newspaper, called in an editorial yesterday for Harvard to unite professors from different schools into one faculty senate, citing concerns that the call for Summers's resignation from the Arts and Sciences didn't represent the views of the faculty at large. It's too early to tell whether Harvard professors and its administration would support changing the faculty setup.

Arts and Sciences, by far the largest school, has typically had the strongest voice and is the only school in which the president chairs faculty meetings. Summers announced last week that he would resign this summer, citing the deep opposition to him in Arts and Sciences, which houses the undergraduate college and the PhD programs.

Today, most of Harvard's 10 schools have some mechanism for faculty input, whether it's faculty-wide meetings or smaller, elected faculty councils. But the university has no formal way for professors from different schools to meet regularly.

''For a university that boasts such a distinguished and progressive faculty in all of its schools, Harvard is not living up to its own standard when it refuses to democratize and consolidate the voice of its professoriate," the Crimson's editorial said.

Without a faculty senate, the university and public have a skewed view of who is in charge, said William G. Tierney, director of the Center for Higher Education Policy Analysis at the University of Southern California. Tierney's 2003 survey of hundreds of colleges and universities found that 90 percent had faculty senates.

The Faculty of Arts and Sciences' no-confidence vote in Summers last year made the group appear as if it spoke for the entire university, Tierney said.

''A vote like that is really something that should come from a university faculty at large," he said. ''It's kind of like the state of Massachusetts voting to impeach President Bush."

Still, his survey found widespread unhappiness among faculty senates, partly because their authority is often unclear. Some universities' senates, like the 35-member group at New York University, are advisory only, while Stanford's 55-member senate is viewed as more powerful and has approved new academic majors and interdisciplinary programs.

Among Harvard professors yesterday, views about a university-wide group ranged from enthusiasm to a sense that it would be a waste of time.

Graham Allison, former dean of the Kennedy School of Government and a professor there, said it makes more sense for faculty to focus on advising the deans.

''I just don't quite see what an interfaculty parliament would do, other than being a talk fest," he said.

Some backers of a university-wide faculty group see it as a way of keeping Arts and Sciences from having control.

Yet, even some Arts and Sciences professors favor the idea. ''It's important for other schools to be heard," said anthropology professor Arthur Kleinman, a member of the elected faculty council in Arts and Sciences.

During the debate over whether Summers should resign, other faculties ''had their noses out of joint, because they felt no one was listening to them," Kleinman said.

Harvey Cox, a professor at Harvard Divinity School since 1965, said it would be a good idea to have a new faculty group in place to greet the next president. Cox said the idea of a university-wide group was discussed at Harvard as far back as the Vietnam-era campus unrest in 1969.

Gary Feldman, a Harvard physics professor who once served on Stanford's faculty senate, said it would be ''a very bad idea" for Harvard to emulate Stanford.

''It basically leads to a disenfranchisement of the average faculty members," said Feldman, who added that it also leads to more uninformed discussions, for example when medical school professors weigh in on the undergraduate curriculum.

Bombardieri can be reached at bombardieri@globe.com; Sacchetti at msacchetti@globe.com.