Dear Members of the Harvard Community,
Harvard’s University-wide Statement on Rights and Responsibilities (USRR) expresses our core commitments to advancing freedom of thought, open inquiry, and free speech; to protecting the safety and well-being of members of the Harvard community; and to ensuring that all within our community can pursue a shared mission of academic excellence through teaching, learning, and research. To fully realize those commitments, the processes by which we implement them must be fair, effective, and evenhanded. In recent years, this goal has been challenged in a growing number of disciplinary cases involving students from different Schools who are involved in the same event or behavior but may be subject to quite different investigative and fact-finding processes. Fully acknowledging that, at Harvard, each School is responsible for determining discipline for its own students, the facts informing discipline should not vary depending on what School a particular student attends.
The University Committee on Rights and Responsibilities (UCRR) offers a solution to this problem. Established in 1970 and populated each year with faculty and students designated by each School, the UCRR was designed to coordinate fact-finding processes involving multiple Schools while leaving the final disciplinary decisions to the Schools themselves. Until now, however, effective procedures for implementing this function have not been formalized.
Last fall, the president and provost convened a working group of academic leaders to propose appropriate procedures, drawing upon other University processes already in place. This working group solicited feedback from faculty and staff on disciplinary boards across the University. The proposed procedures closely track those recently adopted to implement other University-wide policies.
Interim President Garber has now adopted the proposed UCRR Procedures for an initial period of two years. During this period, we will gain experience and gather additional community input about the UCRR Procedures so that revisions may be made as appropriate.
We support this decision, also endorsed by the Harvard Corporation, as an important step toward promoting more consistent application of the USRR by ensuring that each School’s disciplinary decision in cross-school cases will be informed by a common understanding of the relevant facts. We welcome your input, and we are grateful for your cooperation.
Sincerely,
Alan M. Garber
Interim President
John F. Manning
Interim Provost
Meredith Weenick
Executive Vice President
Andrea Baccarelli
Dean, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
Tomiko Brown-Nagin
Dean, Harvard Radcliffe Institute
Nancy Coleman
Dean, Division of Continuing Education and University Extension
George Q. Daley
Dean, Harvard Medical School
Srikant Datar
Dean, Harvard Business School
Emma Dench
Dean, Harvard Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
Marla Frederick
Dean, Harvard Divinity School
William V. Giannobile
Dean, Harvard School of Dental Medicine
John C.P. Goldberg
Interim Dean, Harvard Law School
Hopi E. Hoekstra
Edgerley Family Dean, Faculty of Arts and Sciences
Rakesh Khurana
Danoff Dean, Harvard College
Nonie K. Lesaux
Interim Dean, Harvard Graduate School of Education
David C. Parkes
Dean, Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences
Jeremy Weinstein
Dean, Harvard Kennedy School of Government
Sarah M. Whiting
Dean, Harvard Graduate School of Design
