This comment addresses issues of University
governance. The current policy of discipline (“sanctions”) for students
entering the College this fall was never voted by the Faculty and cannot be
regarded as legitimate. Any policy regarding discipline (“sanctions”) or
prohibitions against certain behaviors should be voted by the Faculty.
This is clearly stipulated by the University Statutes
(especially the 5th and 11th Statutes). This includes any determination
to phase out student membership in USGSOs (or other organizations) and
effectively to prohibit such membership as a precondition of being a member of
the College. No administrator—Dean or President—has the inherent
statutory power to make or change any policy of discipline or sanction.
This power belongs to the Faculty. If the Faculty permit this
particular power to be exercised by some other body or by any administrator
without expressly delegating it, then the Faculty will forever cede an
important power and will diminish their own standing to effect or change any policy.
Furthermore, any policy that has not been voted and adopted by the Faculty, and
thus does not appear in the Handbook for Students, would almost
surely be subject to legal challenge if that policy were enforced.
Despite this, even this current website declares, "The President will make
the final decision." This is not shared governance. Such an
assumption of presidential power further diminishes the power of the
Faculty. As such power is further eroded, members of the Faculty will
inevitably take less interest in matters that they feel–that they are
told--they cannot decide. Already many colleagues believe that Faculty
meetings are too orchestrated and consistently assume a preordained outcome.
The Committee on
Unrecognized Single-Gender Social Organizations (the committee) co-chaired by
Dean Khurana and Professor Clark is nota faculty committee and
should not be called a faculty committee. It is an
administration-faculty-student committee. (Or it may be called, as the
ROTC committee of similar composition was called in the early 1990s, simply a
committee.) I have never heard a committee with such a composition ever
before referred to as a “faculty committee.” Calling it that gives the
false impression that all or almost all its members belong to the teaching
faculty. I believe that the report of the committee never refers to the
committee itself as a faculty committee. Of twenty-seven members, eleven
are tenured faculty, two are untenured faculty, two Allston Burr assistant
deans, six are administrators appointed by various deans or other
administrators, and six are students apparently selected by administrators and
not elected or selected by their peers as representatives. This mix of
members may be desirable. However, a committee so composed is not a
faculty committee. In fact, teaching faculty are in a minority unless the
Allston Burr assistant deans are counted as teaching faculty (the masthead of
the committee does not indicate a teaching appointment for either). Even
if they are counted, then Faculty are in the barest majority. Despite all
this, according to the Crimson (July 21, 2017), a spokesperson
for Dean Khurana, Rachael Dane, in an email to the Crimson referred
to the committee as “the faculty committee.”
As reference to my remarks
at the December 6, 2016, FAS Faculty meeting will indicate, the current policy
of sanctioning students, which is a policy of discipline, cannot be regarded as
institutionally legitimate. By extension, despite its good will and work,
the Implementation Committee is also illegitimate. All disciplinary
policy and its enforcement comes directly by a vote of the
Faculty unless the Faculty delegates it to some other body or person by a vote,
or unless in very rare cases there is strong evidence that a student has
violated the University policy on Rights and Responsibilities. That is
what the Fifth and Eleventh Statutes of the University clearly and
unambiguously state.
The Faculty have never
taken a vote on the current policy. The Administration never presented
that policy to the Faculty for a vote, despite several opportunities.
The recommendation of
the committee as issued constitutes a form of discipline, too; or if it is
argued that it does not, then it forms a sweeping change in the manner in which
the College will police and dictate the social lives of students and take
action against students (discipline them) if they violate the policy.
Such a change should be voted by the Faculty.
For Dean Smith to say
in his charge to the committee that, “Any recommended change to
our current policy must be approved by the President of the University” is
to abrogate without warrant or precedent whatever mode of shared governance we
enjoy. It also further ensconces the “current policy” as legitimate when
it is not.
Dean Smith also stated
at a Faculty meeting this spring that the manner in which we are proceeding is
what “we have always done.” With forty years experience on the Faculty
and attendance at nearly every FAS Faculty meeting during those decades (when I
was not on leave), as well as membership in over three dozen faculty committees
(including Faculty Council, twice, and its Docket Committee), as well as
committees with students and administrators as equal voting members, including
the Committee on College Life in the 1980s at the time when the University and
the male final clubs parted ways, I disagree.
In press
reports late in 2016, Senior Fellow Lee is quoted as saying, “I think
rather than getting into a struggle over who has the right to do what, I
think what [Faust] said is we have a shared responsibility to solve
these issues. I think the first major step was the policy,” meaning the
current policy of disciplinary sanctions.
The Senior Fellow of
the Corporation, a lawyer, thus stated that it is not worth deciding who,
or what body, in the University, has the right to do what.
Taken at face value, imagine what that statement means. He does not
reference the Statutes. They do not favor his view. The
Statutes do not struggle on this matter. The Statutes
are clear. Only the Faculty as a body has the power to act in
this matter. Yes, we have a shared responsibility to solve these issues.
Yet, the actual power to discipline—“power” is the word in
the Statues—is vested in the Faculty. Mr. Lee thinks the first step
should be certain disciplinary sanctions, and that is his opinion.
But such power unambiguously rests with this
Faculty. Otherwise, the Faculty might as well never meet again and
simply do whatever the Dean, the President, and the Senior Fellow of the
Corporation say should be done, no matter what issue is at stake.
Not even power over the curriculum is granted Faculty privilege in the Statutes
equal to the power of the Faculty to determine discipline.
Mr. Lee said, “I think
rather than getting into a struggle over who has the right to do what . . . we
have a shared responsibility to solve these issues.” Yes, we have that
responsibility. So, why worry who or what body or person has the right to
act or to set any policy? In a weird mirror image of what
sometimes—and perhaps even now—occurs in our national polity, why indeed worry?
Why not let the executive do what it wishes—especially if the
executive deems that it alone has ultimate power to determine
how to “solve these issues”? As Dean Smith told the committee, “Any
recommended change to our current policy [itself a policy never voted
upon] must be approved by the President of the University.” Who cares
about precedents, process, Statutes, or the constitutional
fabric? Why not summarily strip flag burners of citizenship and
students of fellowship eligibility? Why bother with written Statutes
and honored principles? Why deliberate? Why vote?
It is said by some
that a vote will come—though perhaps it will be cast procedurally as simply a
vote on relatively brief language, perhaps involving multiple changes, in the Handbook,
and reserved, as such a vote usually is, for the last FAS faculty meeting of
the year, May 2018. What we need is a vigorous Faculty debate on the
current policy of sanctions and on the recommendations of this committee.
We need that debate sooner rather than later.
Town Halls and
meetings outside regular Faculty Meetings are no substitute for Faculty debate
in Faculty meetings. Town Halls may be useful, but Town Halls also permit
one to say that Faculty have been consulted and heard without actually calling
anything to a debate or vote of the Faculty.
The Administration has
done much maneuvering to keep Faculty votes from occurring. Rules of
Faculty Procedure were violated in the December 2016 meeting more than once.
That meeting was even adjourned contrary to the Rules of Faculty
Procedure. Professor Haig’s motion this past spring was referred to the
committee in a manner extremely rare and only at the behest of the Docket
Committee. His motion concerning oaths (affirmations, pledges—a part of
the recommendations of the committee) pertains to the actual though
illegitimate current policy, which remains in force, but the committee appears
to fail to address directly Professor Haig’s motion in any context other than,
it seems, to advocate that the recommendation of the committee not be embodied
in an explicit pledge or oath but in language contained in the Handbook.
Finally, if the account
of the committee votes and voting procedure given in the Crimson (July
21) is accurate, then there is no basis to believe that a majority or even the
largest plurality of the committee voted in favor of what was stated as the
recommendation of the committee. This is deeply disturbing. Even if
one eliminates the four options that received no votes, voting on 6 options when
several have significant overlap, and permitting each committee member to vote
for more than one option though not at the same time stipulating the exact
number of votes that each committee member must cast (two, for example, or
three), produces unclear results. At best the process of voting was so
irregular and botched as to be inconsequential or nugatory, giving only the
most general impression of committee views; certainly, the process of voting in
the committee cannot be regarded as determinative nor as a genuine measure of
the varied views of the committee members. If it is argued that it was
“approval voting,” then committee members should have been told that.
And, despite its advocates, approval voting cannot measure the degree of
preference that members may have between one option they view as preferable to
the status quo versus another option they also view as preferable to the status
quo. At worst, the process of voting may have been designed to obfuscate
and make elastic the very act of voting itself in order to permit the
declaration of a recommendation that had been determined beforehand by one or
both the co-chairs of the committee who knew that such a recommendation had at
least some support. Moreover, neither of the two options that received
the most votes became the recommendation of the committee.
James Engell
Professor,
FAS
(Updated August 17, 2017 to match final version of the text posted to the FAS Wiki)
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