With nearly 7,000 students enrolled in courses each semester, Harvard College has nearly 7,000 different sources of input on how the University should be run. Students from all different walks of life bring differing ideas about the countless decisions university administrators make. Harvard College is undoubtedly free to make complex and challenging decisions as it sees fit, but to fulfill its mission and “educate the citizens and citizen-leaders for our society,” it must create spaces for such leaders to grow as well as set a standard for leadership. Both of these charges necessitate a successful system for collecting input from students about their concerns.
Unfortunately, as Texas A&M communications professor Tim Coombes noted in an interview with the HPR, “Universities are not set up to handle social concerns.” Harvard, like most colleges, has adopted a bureaucratic approach to its organization, in large part due to its size. Yet as Pete Mackey, former communications executive at Amherst College and Bucknell University, told the HPR, “There is normally a threshold where the scale of the school becomes such that the bureaucracy spreads out and different people take on particular roles.”
By creating a multitude of dean positions, Harvard divides the numerous responsibilities entrusted to them. In theory, this helps both the institution and its students. Bureaucracy allows Harvard to allocate resources more efficiently and permits greater specialization in the everyday tasks that administrators carry out. Problems arise, though, when there is no dean assigned to handle a certain set of student concerns, or when the dedicated office is unclear or unable to assist. At present, Harvard’s bureaucracy is too difficult to navigate and does not properly catalyze genuine communication with its students. To solve this, Harvard must give students direct access to decision-making officials who will regularly hear student concerns.
Breaking Down Bureaucracy
The overarching issue with bureaucracy, according to Coombes, is that “students are often an overlooked constituency.” Any time a university considers making a change, it must look to all of its stakeholders. While the student body is one of these stakeholders, others like faculty, donors, and trustees often take precedence and drown out student voices.
James Barge, a professor of communications at Texas A&M University, noted in an interview with the HPR that “a lot of times in bureaucracy … they set up what they think are good systems but then no one knows how to access or use them.” At Harvard, student concerns that fall outside the bounds of a given office must navigate a struggling and frustrating system. If students raise a problem that sits outside the obvious purview of any existing office, it easily gets lost, and resolution can take months.
Zoë Hopkins, a sophomore and student activist on the Harvard Prison Divestment Campaign’s Direct Action team, expressed her frustration with this process. “I think the administration is very complex and opaque,” Hopkins said. “It hasn’t been made clear to me where to begin and who to talk to first.” Hopkins also spoke of difficulties in meeting with administrators to discuss the Prison Divestment Campaign’s goals. “We have not been able to facilitate a formal sit down between our campaign and the administration beyond [University] President [Lawrence] Bacow’s office hours,” she continued. “We have not found it very easy to open up lines of communication between our group and the administration.” For concerns like divestment that lack a specific office, open communication with the university is difficult to establish.
Even when students are able to voice a concern, it feels like “fake listening,” Barge explained. “There is not going to be any change but we have to go through the ritual of appearing to listen.” When this happens, it breaks down students’ trust and suggests administrators do not care about their concerns. For example, Bacow holds office hours twice a semester for an hour. The Office of the President claims that these office hours “give both students and the president an opportunity to meet and discuss a wide variety of subjects affecting them and the University,” but with only two hours open for the entirety of a semester, they hardly provide an opportunity for true discussion and engagement.
Mackey blames the issue on the framework under which higher education was created. “When an undergraduate group wants the institution to get something done right away, that urgency, even around the best ideas, can run contrary to the pace of the entire reward system of the school of which they are part,” he said. “But that deliberative reward system is at the same time arguably one of the reasons that higher education has stood the test of time for hundreds and hundreds of years.” The institutional design of university administration is not geared towards the fast-paced, emotional methods of student advocacy, Mackey believes. “When you as a culture have rewarded deliberativeness, rationality, reflection and frankly, long time periods to make decisions, it can run contrary to the nature of that institution to be swayed by emotion or to make decisions rapidly.”
What Harvard is Missing
Harvard’s administration needs to open more direct and sincere lines of communication with its student body. Bacow only holds office hours twice a semester, a practice “he has inherited from Harvard presidents in the past,” Hopkins said. “It belongs to a greater pattern of the Harvard administration being closed off and unwilling to engage in frank dialogue with students.” Coombes points out that if students want to change the way universities are run, they “need to understand who makes those decisions, and that’s typically going to be at the very highest level.” Students are rendered powerless if they are unable to successfully meet with some of Harvard’s most difficult-to-reach leaders.
It is impossible for Bacow or any other Harvard decision-maker to meet with every concerned student or group. However, access should not be restricted to office hours. Coombes advises “getting the pulse of the students on these various issues, and they can prioritize those and decide which ones should go farther up the chain of command.” He suggests assembling a group of students charged with listening to the concerns of the student body and bringing those concerns to the administration at monthly meetings. This highly centralized body of students would have greater access to powerful officials because it would “[limit] the pooling of contact,” according to Coombes. Centralization would reverse Harvard’s excessive bureaucratic division into committees, replacing it with a system in which one body would report directly to the administration. But for a program like this to work, it is vital that this group of students be allowed to voice concerns directly to individuals with the power to make change.
The infrastructure surrounding Harvard’s efforts to garner student input need to be reworked so that true conversations between administrators and students can take place. While this does not ensure that the changes some students hope to see will occur, it will help students be more heard. “Conversations don’t necessarily mean everyone agrees or people change their mind,” Barge points out. “A conversation simply means you’ve been able to articulate what your viewpoint is. You feel you have been heard.” This is the first step in creating a bureaucracy that more successfully incorporates nearly 7,000 different points of view.
Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons / Caroline Culler