An Academic Agenda

Opportunities for a limited-term administration

Over a coffee in Harvard Square on a damp August morning—the lull before what he feared might be another stormy academic year—a senior administrator outlined three priorities for restoring the University’s moorings. First came refocusing on the academic mission: a no-brainer for an elite research and teaching institution. The second he encapsulated as “debureaucratization”: shedding roles and processes that don’t contribute to, or detract from, the first. Third was simply “Veritas”: truth-telling, in the hope that community members would respond to leaders who embrace that responsibility, whatever those truths turn out to be.

The conversation wasn’t framed as an agenda for Alan M. Garber, whose appointment as the thirty-first president had been announced four days earlier, on August 2. But it could be. A time-limited term in Massachusetts Hall (Garber is to serve through June 30, 2027) is a novelty—but also, perhaps, an advantage: a president with a thousand days of running room might limit his targets and emphasize what they are. After a year in which the world was way too much with Harvard—politicians savaging this and other universities’ leaders, attempting to micromanage everything from the curriculum and appointments to disciplinary procedures; wrong-headed and ill-intentioned social media attacks; misperceptions among protestors that their performances had an actual impact on global issues like the Mideast war—a back-to-basics to-do list seems warranted. Moreover, these three agenda items reinforce one another.

Academics. The Harvard Gazette report on Garber’s appointment highlighted his administrative and academic service as provost under three presidents. Beyond the formation and sale of the learning platform edX, and supervision of the response to the pandemic and of the major scientific institutes and initiatives begun during Lawrence S. Bacow’s presidency, his direct provostial portfolio encompassed faculty development and diversity, technology, and oversight of everything from the American Repertory Theater to the museums, libraries, and University Health Services. As the first provost to become president, Garber knew the terrain like no one before him.

In seven months as interim president, he met the moment, initiating task forces to combat discrimination on campus, foster constructive discourse, and determine the limits of institutional position-taking on public issues. He managed the response to a pro-Palestinian protest encampment in Harvard Yard without yielding on policy or resorting to police action (see harvardmag.com/president-garber-24). Those actions responded to real problems revealed during the year and helped Harvard have a more civil, successful spring term than many peers (a better outcome than it was given credit for).

But even as most students went to classes and most professors carried on their scholarship, there wasn’t much room to focus on teaching and research when facing distressed and angry peers, as well as lawsuits, federal investigations, irate alumni, and unreasonable congressional demands for information. As reported, Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) Dean Hopi Hoekstra sounded almost wistful when she told colleagues last spring how little opportunity she and they had had to focus on matters intellectual and educational (see harvardmag.com/fas-task-24).

Garber’s familiarity with everything the University does, and awareness of likely challenges, are huge advantages under these circumstances. In his opening-days messages (see page 13) and subsequent decisions—like the September 5 declaration that doxing attacks violate University policies—he clearly said all the right, and necessary, things for the present moment.

But perhaps those attributes and statements are also a kind of noise, when what the place needs most is a signal: less a management than a leadership role, conveying an unmistakable message about the institution’s reason for being. As Columbia University’s Katrina A. Armstrong (like Garber, a physician) told her community on August 14, when she suddenly became its interim president, “I am acutely aware of the trials the University has faced over the past year. We should neither understate their significance, nor allow them to define who we are and what we will become.”

Absent a focal installation event and address, President Garber will reveal his agenda as this school year proceeds. How might he choose?

It has been a long time since President Derek C. Bok delivered thoughtful annual messages on curricular effectiveness and pedagogical challenges. It is hard to remember that President Neil L. Rudenstine wrote a 24,000-word prospectus detailing the intellectual investments the University Campaign would fund—and his partner, Dean Jeremy R. Knowles, reported each fall on FAS’s progress toward realizing those aims. Taking a longer view, they propounded an academic vision for the place.

Those precedents seem pertinent. If Harvard is to extricate itself from its current morass, its focus must be academic preeminence. That work can’t be delegated: the president must embody the University’s character as a center for education, teaching, and discovery (and as nearly as possible, to the exclusion of lesser claims). That is the rationale for tenuring a brilliant faculty, imposing high admissions standards, maintaining immense libraries and collections, and operating expensive facilities—all supported by a staggering endowment, largely tax-exempt. Harvard must underscore its academic commitments and accomplishments, first and foremost through the voice and presence of its president.

Bureaucracy. It is a common complaint that universities have become grossly overstaffed (often a parallel to the claim that the U.S. government’s trillion-dollar deficits could be wiped out by eliminating “waste”).

The ranks of non-teaching employees have grown, for good reasons: information technology has become ubiquitous (even humanities scholars now process lots of data); sponsored-research funding has increased (requiring more research staff and grant-compliance personnel); and mandates for student health and well-being have proliferated (enter new kinds of service providers, and still more reporting). But such causes aside, Harvard is a rich nonprofit institution, not subject to the market constraints businesses face; as far as anyone can remember, once it starts doing something, it never stops—so the place expands by accretion. There is no Wegovy for excess academic poundage.

Lots of layers and processes result. Informed observers say decisions here are reviewed and refined far more than at similar institutions. That costs money. More important are the costs of delay and caution when the energizing principle ought to be the search for and testing of exciting new ideas. Sluggishness is exasperating to faculty members and eager young learners, inexplicable to the public or prospective funders.

And a bureaucracy’s natural conservatism casts a pall over communications at a time when these matter more than ever. When the University appears always in a defensive crouch, wondering how it will next be criticized as the elite institution it is, what gets lost is the story of what its students learn and what its scholars discover—and why that matters. The neutering of leaders’ voices of late—the devolution of that responsibility to staff, the proliferation of off-the-record and background briefings and ubiquitous lawyering-up—diminishes Harvard presidents’ and deans’ effectiveness when they speak internally and with the wider world. It dehumanizes this most human of places and reduces its credibility. (“Raising Voices,” May-June 2024, page 4, addressed this point further.)

This bureaucratic overburdening sops up resources that should bolster the academic mission. The associated unresponsiveness imposes even higher costs—ones Harvard cannot afford.

Veritas. What kinds of truths might Harvard, and others, need to hear now—from leaders with a clear academic vision and a distinctive voice?

During the past year, critics within and beyond the community who claim that diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies undercut the commitment to merit have further argued that such initiatives blinded it to antisemitism. What do Harvard’s leaders think about those claims—and about how to recruit talented students and faculty members under current constraints?

At the same time, members of Congress and of the Harvard Jewish Alumni Alliance have recycled factually preposterous reports that billions of dollars of contributions from foreign entities (“Middle Eastern anti-democratic governments”) have warped Harvard’s policies and positions. Does anyone care to disclose the data in rebuttal—and to address the matter of donor influence?

On campus, amid protests of varying kinds and intensities, who is posing questions about their intent and efficacy (are they meant to persuade others and change policy and behavior, or merely performative?) and about participants’ willingness to face the consequences of their civil disobedience? Those with lived experience of the 1960s and even after might play an educational role, putting the current ructions in the context of the civil rights movement and Vietnam War demonstrations.

Turning to an example of external matters clearly within the scope of higher education, JD Vance, the Republican vice presidential nominee, said in his much-cited 2021 speech, “The Universities Are the Enemy,” that it is wrong for working-class citizens to be told they must mire themselves in crushing student debt to have any chance to live a good life in contemporary America. As Vance knows from his Yale Law experience, it isn’t quite that way. The head of this endowed private university (which in a 2004 initiative introduced radically more generous, simplified financial aid) might point out that only families with elite incomes incur such costs (in term bills, not debt) at such schools—and many students from families with five- and even six-figure incomes pay zero to very little to attend, debt-free. He might highlight far worse pressures on students attending underfunded public institutions, and cite the evidence that attending college yields both brighter employment prospects and more engaging lives. In other words, a restatement of the academic mission.

*  * *

Is it difficult to focus on that mission, to clear the decks, and to address hard issues head-on? Surely. Might it feel dangerous to speak out, at the risk of incurring criticism from some quarter? Absolutely. But the opportunity costs of failing to do so—continued fuzziness about a university’s proper work, on campus and beyond; deepening institutional torpor; and leaders’ further distancing from truth-telling—seem much higher.

Could any president change Harvard’s culture along all these dimensions in a thousand days? Not decisively. But making even slight headway on any or all would be a worthy legacy, especially given the remarkably difficult circumstances under which this new administration was created last winter. 

—John S. Rosenberg

Click here for the November-December 2024 issue table of contents

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