Dear Members of the Harvard Community,
The University-wide Statement on Rights and Responsibilities (USRR) expresses our strong commitment to free speech, including the right to protest and dissent, as well as the rights of Harvard community members to learn, teach, research, live, and work without interference or disruption. These rights and responsibilities define our shared obligations to one another as members of the Harvard community.
Over the past year, we have continued to examine how the University can uphold these rights and responsibilities for everyone in our community and provide greater consistency in addressing policy violations, including, where appropriate, through disciplinary proceedings. These considerations have been informed by important and substantive feedback from our community.
As a result of these considerations, the Governing Boards have approved a proposal that empowers the president to call on a faculty panel of the University Committee on Rights and Responsibilities (UCRR) to investigate, find facts, and impose discipline in cross-School cases involving alleged violations of the USRR or Campus Use Rules. As part of this change, the president will establish a process for creating and implementing procedures that will be reviewed at the end of two full academic years.
Our effort builds on the University’s work over the last year to clarify further the rights and responsibilities we share while reaffirming free expression, mutual respect, and content-neutral enforcement. In January 2024, we clarified time, place, and manner guidance prohibiting protest, no matter the content, in our classrooms, libraries, dining halls, and residential spaces. Last summer, we published Campus Use Rules governing the shared use of common spaces across our campus grounds and buildings. In July, we took an interim step, enabling the UCRR to investigate and find facts, but not impose discipline, in cross-School cases.
The additional step we announce today is aligned with the foundational goals of the USRR, which has defined not only our rights but also our responsibilities to one another for more than half a century. These aspirations, though, can only be realized through the fair, effective, and consistent enforcement of disciplinary processes. In a growing number of cases, students from multiple Schools have participated in the same disruptive activity but received significantly different discipline. This outcome has not only raised concerns about evenhandedness but also made it more difficult for any Faculty to discipline their own students when they violate the rights of others.
The creation and implementation of new procedures is designed to ensure that disciplinary processes in cross-School cases treat like cases alike. Certainly, different consequences may be appropriate for similar conduct by a first-year undergraduate as opposed to a third-year professional school student. But no student should receive different discipline based on nothing more than the Harvard School(s) in which they are enrolled.
We will soon release provisional procedures to allow the UCRR to begin its work while we gather community input to inform more permanent procedures. Details will need to be worked out, but the procedures will be designed to ensure continued faculty agency in the disciplinary processes affecting their students and will ensure due process for all our students. We look forward to your input, and we are grateful for your cooperation as we work together toward building a more consistent and effective disciplinary process.
Sincerely,
Alan M. Garber
President