Weekly Business Insights from Top Ten Business Magazines | Week 330
Extractive summaries and key takeaways from the articles curated from TOP TEN BUSINESS MAGAZINES to promote informed business decision-making | Since September 2017 | Week 330 | January 5-11, 2024
Personal Development, Leading & Managing Section | 3
Yale management professor: ‘Harvard’s board is guilty of 5 key failures. Here’s how to avoid repeating them’
By Jeffrey Sonnenfeld | Fortune Magazine | January 11, 2024
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The leadership change at Harvard should not be greeted with joy as it is not only a sad moment for the individuals and institutions involved but also feeds populist skepticism over higher education’s credibility. At 387 years old, Harvard University is the USA’s oldest higher educational institution and long an unsurpassed global beacon of knowledge and intellectual greatness in all disciplines–but it should go back to school when it comes to governance.
The abrupt end of President Claudine Gay’s historically brief six-month term as president of Harvard startled Gay’s detractors and defenders alike. This offers five classic corporate governance failures for our learning:
- Failed diligence. The first problem is one of obvious failed diligence in the search process. The Harvard Corporation board, the university’s primary governing body, requested Gay’s resignation a mere two weeks after they announced their “confidence that President Gay is the right leader to help our community heal and to address the very serious societal issues we are facing.” But the Harvard-Gay fiasco began with what was perceived–regardless of the facts–as a hasty, careless hiring process, in what was referred as the “shortest presidential search in history.”
- Poor responsiveness to key stakeholders worried about rising campus antisemitism. Many campus voices and enraged alumni criticized university presidents at schools such as Harvard, University of Pennsylvania, Cornell, MIT, Stanford, Vanderbilt, University of North Carolina, and Berkeley for their tepid, tardy, and avoidant responses often minimizing or even ignoring the brutal atrocities inflicted upon Israeli civilians on Oct. 7. Renowned mega-donors threatened to withhold needed funds and boycott hiring pro-Hamas students–and even called for the removal of unresponsive university presidents. These calls became louder and more forceful following the poor congressional testimony of the presidents of Harvard, Penn, and MIT as they failed to condemn calls for the genocide targeting Jews as clear violations of campus hate speech guidelines. Gay’s testimony was perceived as overly rehearsed, arrogant, and avoidant.
- Failures in the duty of care and premature denials of misconduct allegations. The Harvard Corporation hastily conducted a review, rather than a genuine comprehensive independent investigation (as in similar cases such as the recent forced exit of the president of Stanford over academic integrity matters and conduct concerns). Credibility was weakened further through the constant drip of facts. The clear university guidelines on plagiarism were misinterpreted, creating a unique “above the rules” special exemption for Gay, with the violations downplayed as “a few incidents of inadequate citations.”
- Failures to address the serious erosion of Harvard’s brand and institutional mission. The board seemed motivated to attack the legitimacy of critics regardless of the veracity of the allegations and the strength of the evidence in an effort to protect their president, not the value of the enterprise. By allowing the erosion of the school’s public reputation for integrity and truth and a breakdown of trust internally, the board was negligent in attending to the priorities of key stakeholders: students, faculty, staff, and alumni. The board’s negligence has damaged the attractiveness of Harvard to the outside world, with consequences such as reduced applications, falling job placement, and development funding.
- Unexplained violations of collegial shared governance and presumptions of racial bias. Faculty voices are traditionally solicited in leadership staffing decisions in higher education. That practice is termed “shared governance.” The unexplained reversal of support for Gay leading to her resignation made the board look capricious and confused, with faculty members left in the dark. The vague cursory statement from the Harvard Corporation contradicted widespread calls for better transparency and communication by stakeholders.
2 key takeaways from the article
- The leadership change at Harvard should not be greeted with joy as it is not only a sad moment for the individuals and institutions involved but also feeds populist skepticism over higher education’s credibility. At 387 years old, Harvard University is the USA’s oldest higher educational institution and long an unsurpassed global beacon of knowledge and intellectual greatness in all disciplines–but it should go back to school when it comes to governance.
- The abrupt end of President Claudine Gay’s historically brief six-month term as president of Harvard startled Gay’s detractors and defenders alike. This offers five classic corporate governance failures for our learning: failed diligence, Poor responsiveness to key stakeholders worried about rising campus antisemitism, failures in the duty of care and premature denials of misconduct allegations, and failures to address the serious erosion of Harvard’s brand and institutional mission.
(Copyright lies with the publisher)
Topics: Leadership, Board Governance, Higher Education