The Deep Problems Are The HARVARD CORPORATIONS Problems

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HARVARD PRESIDENT EXPOSED!

Harvard President Claudine Gay participated in the political assassination of a brilliant black scholar at Harvard named Roland Fryer. This is just one of the many problematic aspects of her career. @BillAckman

Filmmaker Rob Montz @robmontz… pic.twitter.com/rDIDS4IrWx

— Colonel Kurtz -Controversy, Depp/MeToo/Manson Etc. (@colonelkurtz99) December 12, 2023

yahoo  |  During the weekend that the corporation met to decide Gay’s future, she participated in some of those discussions and had the opportunity to review the corporation’s Dec. 12 statement in her defense before it became public, two people involved in the process said.

According to a person consulted by the corporation, the body discussed but opted against releasing a detailed, public independent review in the style of Stanford University, whose president resigned this summer.

Harvard’s board is led by Pritzker, who was an early backer of Barack Obama’s presidency and later served as secretary of commerce under his administration. Despite her leadership role, Pritzker, a champion of Gay’s, has not spoken publicly since the controversy began, leaving the corporation to communicate through a single public statement.

The other 10 members, in addition to Gay, include relatively unknown financiers, donors, a former justice of the Supreme Court of California, a former CEO of American Express and former presidents of Princeton University and Amherst College.

The board meets several times a year, and members serve six-year terms that can be renewed once. How it identifies and chooses its members, who are known as fellows, is something of a mystery. Outgoing members help select their own replacements.

Pritzker has been the principal point of contact for major donors and others seeking to counsel Harvard on the path forward.

The board seeks to build a well-rounded group of people who have complementary expertise to help govern the university, said Richard Chait, a professor emeritus at Harvard who studied governance in higher education and was an adviser when the Harvard Corp. expanded in size more than a decade ago.

Even after expanding, the panel is still smaller than the boards of many other leading universities, according to Chait, who said the average private university has about 30 or more board members.

Board members are not paid for their role. “Not only is it unpaid, but there is an expectation of a reverse cash flow — all trustees have an expectation that the institution will be a philanthropic priority consistent with their means,” Chait said.

The corporation has weighed in on key questions — for example, in 2016, it approved a change to the shield of Harvard’s law school, which was modeled on the crest of an 18th-century enslaver.

In the past several weeks, more faculty members, donors, alumni and outsiders have raised questions about the corporation’s apparent failure to vet Gay’s scholarship before promoting her to the presidency in July and for its subsequent silence in recent weeks.

“The corporation should have done their homework, and apparently they did not,” said Avi Loeb, a Harvard science professor who has been publicly critical of the school’s response after the Hamas attack on Israel in which about 1,200 people were killed.

“They don’t engage in criticism the way they should,” Loeb said of the corporation. “They don’t want the people who disagree with them to speak with them.”