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Whose mess is it?
The August issue of Vanity Fair includes an in-depth feature on the economic woes facing Harvard. As the author, Nina Munk, succinctly concludes:"Harvard is in trouble." The endowment has plummeted to $26 billion from a high of $37 billion just a year ago, the debt is now at $6 billion -- on which Harvard pays $517 million a year in interest -- and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences faces a $220 million deficit. Anonymous sources predict the future will bring fewer professors, TA's, and support staff, less money for research, travel and books, the down grading of junior varsity teams and a range of other cutbacks.
According to Munk, "the inevitable recriminations and backbiting have started." Yet no one, it seems, can decide who is really to blame for this debacle: "Invariably, somebody else had the 'ultimate fiduciary responsibility.'"
And who would that be?
Presumably, the university's two governing boards: the Harvard Corporation and the Board of Overseers, the latter being the body that former President Charles W. Eliot insisted should always "manifest an attitude of suspicious vigilance towards the Corporation." We do not know whether or how either one is engaging the momentous issues before Harvard, but we have no reason to believe that they are engaging in the kind of oversight that any good board should undertake. In fact, when Harvey Silverglate and Robert Freedman, two petition candidates for the Board of Overseers, started raising serious questions about the status quo, their efforts were met with a low-key but unmistakable get-out-the-vote campaign to sideline them.
Concerns about the status quo are surely in order. And no less relevant a source than Harvard Magazine offered a series of questions on governance in 2006 that bear directly on current events.
The editors aimed to analyze how Harvard was governed by posing the following questions: "Might the Corporation be more transparent about its work, and if so, how? Beyond choosing and evaluating the president, should the Corporation participate visibly in the making of or communication about major University decisions or priorities... ? How can a relatively small governing body which operates informally and through personal connections maintain good sources of information and perspective when its members increasingly come from farther afield and have other important duties to fulfill -- and when Harvard itself has grown vastly larger and more complex in recent decades?"
These questions are eerily prescient and, sadly, remain unanswered. Yet, if they are not thoughtfully addressed, recent events suggest that no amount of money in the world will ensure Harvard's continued prestige. As one unnamed member of the Harvard Management Company wailed in the Vanity Fair article: "This is a matter of leadership. This is not about money."
Let us hope that buck passing stops soon.
Posted by Anne D. Neal on August 04, 2009 at August 4, 2009 04:51 PM
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