After the turmoil of the last several months, do you think the Board of Overseers should step in to reassure donors? If so, how?
With everything that’s been going on, it probably makes sense not just for the Overseers but for the Corporation itself, as the two boards that are the two governing boards of Harvard, to be able to reach out to key stakeholders. I think donors could be one of those key stakeholders — I don’t think they’re the only one. But I think, you know, the ability to have those ongoing conversations, particularly with some of the tough times that have been going on, makes a lot of sense.
Do you think the current Board of Overseers election process is fair? Would you support lowering the write-in candidate signature threshold?
This is my first time as a candidate, though I’ve voted in the past. I haven’t heard a lot about the challenges or the obstacles to get onto the ballot for someone who’s coming in from outside of the process. So it seems to me like it has been fair in the past, in terms of the tools that people can use, either getting directly nominated or petitioning. I know candidates who petitioned have been able to get onto the ballot in the past.
But we can always get better at the processes that we’re moving forward. So I think we’d have to really look historically to see if the threshold level has been way too high.
Since the University changed the write-in candidate signature threshold roughly 10 years ago, there have been a number of high-profile write-in campaigns — including several this year — that have failed, leading to significant criticisms of the process. Does that concern you?
I’d want to hear more about what the thinking was to have changed things 10 years ago. What we don’t want to do is to change things in a reactionary kind of way. So I want to hear more.
I think what’s really important here is, like I mentioned before, you want to have a process that’s going to be fair. But at the same time, I think we’re probably the only university in the country that has this kind of two-tiered governing process. In most places, there’s not even an election — it’s usually pure appointments.
If the data was telling us that over the past 10 years, it has really led to large numbers of people who try to petition to get on not being able to do that, then I think we’d really need to look at that process.
As Harvard now prepares to select Claudine Gay’s permanent successor, would you like to see any changes relative to the search process that selected Gay?
I’ve been involved in a number of searches both at our university and other universities. I know that Harvard does its best to try to reach out to all the different stakeholders, but we literally don’t have the stakeholders on the search committee. Can you do that in this short period of time? I don’t know if you could right now — I’m assuming that even though a committee hasn’t been named, the process has already been moving forward. But I think it’s important for us — we can’t just accept that everything we’ve always done has been the best way to do it.
Even if it’s too late already, we should be open to really looking at how other schools do it and what works best. And how do you make sure that you’re representing different voices on the search committee. I’m thinking about the process we went through with our University recently to make sure that we had students, alumni, and community members on the search committee. That’s different than just having your feedback taken into account.
Recently, Harvard has grappled with campus antisemitism, Islamophobia, and anti-Palestinian racism. In light of these issues, what is your perspective on the current state of campus culture?
The real, honest answer is: I’m not on campus, so it’s hard to really say. Nothing’s monolithic, but there is no doubt that there are real questions about how things have taken place and been handled. What I’m hearing is that there are folks who have not been feeling safe, who’ve not been feeling like the University has done what it should be doing to take care of them.
I don’t know where Harvard is with its latest survey that it’s done with the community, which is a standard thing that universities do every so many years to hear from students, faculty, staff, and different stakeholders about their take on campus culture. I’d love to see that data. And if we haven’t done that recently, it’s going to be important for us to continue to have those conversations.
Then the next important piece becomes what are we going to do: To try to respond to those things to make sure that folks are feeling safe and that we are balancing what a university needs to be doing to take care of its students, its staff, and its faculty with campus free expression and other really important pieces.
Do you support Harvard committing to institutional neutrality? In what areas should Harvard remain neutral?
I don’t think moving quickly to a full, 100-percent notion of institutional neutrality would work, for one reason: that it would be a top-down decision. On university campuses, as you guys know, we are such decentralized institutions, and for something to really stick and to work, you’ve got to get buy-in from the ground up.
But that doesn’t mean you can’t try something. People have talked about this notion of institutional restraint, which is just a fancy way of saying you’re still using the framework — let’s test out this idea that you shouldn’t be taking stances on political or social issues as a university. But of course if anything comes up — key issues that are related to Harvard or what it means to be a higher education institution — you can respond to those.
The University of Chicago, perhaps the most high-profile school to follow a policy of institutional neutrality, has cited that policy to reject calls from student activists to divest from certain financial interests, including in fossil fuels. Do you believe a policy of institutional neutrality should extend to investment decisions?
When you think about this notion of institutional neutrality, something that relates to the University itself is distinct from the question of a pure political issue. But if it’s something that gets closer to home about who you are — and, in this case, it could be where your resources are coming from — that’s a legitimate issue that needs to be discussed. So I don’t think it should be taken off the table. But I don’t think that automatically leads to an answer one way or the other.
How can Harvard respond to attacks against its credibility, or the credibility of higher education more broadly, if it is to be institutionally neutral?
I think that that one’s a little bit more straightforward. Even the folks that you would talk to at the University of Chicago believe anything that’s related directly to you and your particular mission, or the higher education industry, that’s fair game. I can’t think of an example of anyone else across the country who’s taken it to be interpreted that narrowly. And I don’t think we should.
As I’m sure you know, Harvard will soon complete its first admissions cycle following the Supreme Court’s landmark decision curtailing the use of race in college admissions. As the University looks to maintain diversity at the College, do you support Harvard ending preferences for legacies and the children of donors?
I think there’s a couple of ways to think about it. One is: There’s no doubt if you get rid of legacy and donor preferences, you could at least potentially make the case that that levels the playing field a bit.
I could also see an interesting case that if we really see our mission as being to produce a global set of diverse leaders who are going to have impact back in their neighborhoods in their communities — in order for us to do that, what are the tools that we could use? It’s an interesting idea to think of, could you continue to give preferences but only to members of underrepresented groups in a way that matches the notion of the group versus individual idea that the Supreme Court has talked about.
We all knew that this kind of a decision was going to come down. But I think some of us were surprised that it was a little bit narrower. A really strict interpretation of what the Court was saying says that you can’t use race in the decision-making process of admissions. That does not exclude your ability to recruit, to really reach out, to do all these kinds of things before students are getting there, or after they’re there on campus to retain them, to make sure that they feel like they really belong. And we’re fortunate to have the resources to be able to do those things.
To put a fine point on it, would you characterize yourself as supporting or opposing preferences for children of donors and legacies?
My initial reaction is to say that I would support eliminating them. But like I mentioned, I think we also need to be smart about what goals we’re trying to get done. And that’s why I could see an interesting version of keeping them but only for members of underrepresented groups. That’s a very different notion. I lean towards saying “let’s eliminate them,” but if it can help us reach a more important goal through a nuanced version giving that preference to underrepresented groups, I’d be open to that as well.
The past decade has seen a number of allegations of serious misconduct against tenured Harvard professors, ranging from repeated sexual harassment to falsification of data and other research misconduct. Still, to date, there are no known cases of Harvard revoking a professor’s tenure. In what cases, if any, do you believe revoking tenure is justified?
There’s no doubt when there’s any kind of criminal behavior that is not just alleged but then actually is proven to be true. That is a pretty straightforward one. The challenge, I think, for places like Harvard and other elite institutions, is not just about how you’re removing tenure, but it’s also about how you can get tenure. That process itself is tricky at each university.
If we have self-interest of creating a global, diverse set of students who are going to go back to their communities and do some great things and have impact, and we say we’re trying to match that with faculty, we’ve got to be thinking about that as well. It’s not just about the lucky few who actually get through that process.
You mentioned criminal conduct as being a clear case where revocation of tenure is warranted. But the two categories of violations that have been the most prevalent at Harvard have been sexual harassment that fell short of criminal conduct, or at least that was not tried as such, and research misconduct. Do you think there are instances of those two categories of offenses that would justify the revocation of tenure?
You can imagine on a scale sexual harassment claims and evidence. You can imagine the same thing in terms of research misconduct, plagiarism, all those kinds of things. So could there be examples? I’m sure there could be, where, for whatever reason, they don’t go to a criminal proceeding. If there was enough evidence to say, then, yeah, I can see that.
Do you support the creation of an Ethnic Studies department?
I do. I think that if we’re going to continue to say that our goal is to create this global, diverse set of leaders who are gonna have an impact on their communities, then as the demographics of our country and the planet are changing, it’s important for people to understand different perspectives.
There is no doubt that you would love to have people like myself — as a Latino, as a Mexican American — to be able to major and have a course that’s really related to my history. But if we’re really serious about this idea of helping produce folks who are going to have a different set of viewpoints, you can imagine how it’s important for everyone at Harvard to take some courses and to be learning from communities that are different from their own.
I know we’ve got minors, and you can take courses right now. But if you actually had a full department that would allow people to go deeper into learning about not just their own community, but other communities. We aren’t taking enough courses that are actually really exposing us to those different kinds of perspectives. So I think an Ethnic Studies department could help us within that bigger framework as well.
