Harvard University is finally moving forward with the start of the selection process for its 31st president.
Members of the Harvard Corporation, the university's highest governing body, met on campus last week with several prominent faculty members to discuss the search process for the university's next president, according to four people who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the private conversations.
The listening sessions included interviews with undergraduate professors who hold Harvard's highest-ranking professorial positions, as well as members of the 2022 Faculty Advisory Group, which helped with the selection process that led to the selection of former Harvard President Claudine Gay.
University spokesman Jonathan L. Swain confirmed the recent discussions regarding the selection of the next president in a statement Friday.
“As Senior Fellow Penny Pritzker has previously noted, members of the Harvard Board of Trustees continue to solicit input from members of the Harvard community on a range of issues, including aspects of the selection of a future president,” Swain wrote.
The private conversations signal that the board is finally facing up to a key question that has been pushed aside during a semester of wrangling: How should Harvard select its next president?
Gay resigned on January 2, 2024, after just 185 days in the position due to persistent criticism of his handling of anti-Semitism on campus and mounting allegations of plagiarism. Harvard maintained a low profile in the months following his resignation to avoid the media frenzy, other than appointing longtime university president Alan M. Garber (Class of 1976) to lead Harvard on an interim basis.
The only information about the search for the next president came in May, when The Crimson reported that the Corporation had convened a subcommittee to review the selection process, a development that came after the previous one was criticized as opaque, closed and ultimately unsuccessful.
The first step in any recruitment-related business at Harvard University is to finalize the process through which Harvard will conduct its next recruitment before it even starts thinking about candidates and finalists.
There has been some discussion among the board about whether to remove Gerber from his interim role, but the corporation appears to be moving toward a formal search for a chairman, even though several members of the corporation, including senior fellow Penny S. Pritzker (Class of 1981), have publicly supported Gerber.
During a town hall meeting with FAS faculty and foundation officials in April, Pritzker expressed his “full confidence” in Garber.
The support was so strong that one attendee questioned why city officials are keeping Garber in an interim role if they have so much confidence in him.
Pritzker did not rule out the possibility that Garber could one day become the university's permanent president, but said the university would be reluctant to make such an important appointment without input from the broader Harvard consortium.
“One thing a corporation cannot do is appoint its own president at Harvard,” Pritzker said.
—Staff writer Tillie R. Robinson can be reached at tilly.robinson@thecrimson.com. X Follow her at @tillyrobin.
—Staff writer Neil H. Shah can be reached at neil.shah@thecrimson.com. Follow @neilhshah15 on X.
