When a typical university begins looking for a new president, it follows a pretty standard playbook: A search committee is assembled, comprising board members, faculty, and staff. A call is put forth for thoughts and nominations. An outside recruiting firm is brought in to help broaden the hiring pool. Together, these groups vet top candidates and plumb any misgivings — legal, moral, or, yes, academic.
But Harvard is not a typical university.
The nation’s oldest and most prestigious college chooses its leaders through a more insulated process, according to three professors of higher education. A search committee made up of the Harvard Corporation, the 12-person board responsible for university affairs, and three members of the second-highest governing Board of Overseers selects a presidential nominee. Faculty, staff, and student committees advise the effort but have no decision-making role, nor, according to one Harvard governance expert, does the school typically employ an external recruiter.
Once the corporation picks a final candidate, the university’s broader Board of Overseers must vote to approve the pick.
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Now, in the wake of Claudine Gay’s resignation just six months into her presidency, questions abound over whether Harvard should change its search process before embarking on another one.
Harvard declined to share specifics on its search but in a statement Tuesday, the corporation said the process will “begin in due course” and “include broad engagement and consultation with the Harvard community in the time ahead.”
The discussion comes at a pivotal moment for Harvard: Gay left amid a swirl of plagiarism allegations, and it is unclear how her scholarly work as a political science professor was vetted before conservative activists began digging into her academic record and published their findings. (Harvard investigations that followed found instances of inadequate citation in her dissertation and at least two of her articles. Gay herself said she stands “by the integrity of my scholarship” in an earlier statement.)
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As it stands, Harvard relies largely on its internal network to find a new president, said Roger Lewis Geiger, a higher education historian at Penn State University.
Many major candidates in the past had existing relationships to Harvard. The four presidents before Gay — Neil Rudenstine, Larry Summers, Drew Faust, and Lawrence Bacow — all served as either professors, deans, or members of the corporation. Gay first came to Harvard in 2006 as a professor of government, spent three years as dean of Social Sciences, and then served five years as the dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.
That kind of internal experience is valuable in running an organization as complex as Harvard, Geiger said.
“There’s so much tradition and sometimes it’s difficult for an outsider to understand how the nuances of an institution and its multiple parts operate,” he said.
Richard Chait, an education governance expert and Harvard education professor, said that may explain why the university steers away from hiring outside help for the search. Most schools — up to 82 percent, according to a 2018 report by the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges — bring in search firms to find candidates, coordinate interviews, and complete basic background checks, much as corporations often do for executive jobs.
But Harvard may have believed it could perform those tasks on its own, especially if it already knows the top candidates, Chait said.
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“They know who the people they want are,” he added. “The actual pool of plausible candidates is really quite limited. It’s highly unlikely that the president of universities like Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Princeton is going to be someone ‘discovered’ by a search firm, camouflaged, or invisible at another school.”
Chait also said that the more shielded Harvard search does not mean the school takes the process lightly, rather saying that the university “may lead in the number of people consulted and contacted.” Indeed, when Harvard announced its decision to hire Gay, it said it sifted through roughly 600 nominations and met with about 50 “credible” candidates. At five months, it was the shortest presidential search in nearly 70 years, the Harvard Crimson reported at the time.
It can also be hard to parse what university officials prioritize in their search for a new president.
Harvard is not just looking for an academic, said David Chard, a professor at the Wheelock College of Education at Boston University. Values, public speaking abilities, financial and political savvy, and fund-raising abilities are all significant factors. Representation matters, too, at a time when student bodies and university leadership across the country are growing more diverse. Gay was the first Black person and second woman to hold the Harvard presidency.
Harvard is “looking for a leader, not a faculty member,” Chard said. “Families who send their children to these institutions — you have to convince them that you’re taking care of their kids. The expectations are much broader than just managing a firm.”
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But as Gay’s experience shows, an academic misstep can trigger an avalanche of scrutiny, highlighting the tightrope the university walks now in its search for a new president.
“I can’t imagine a more complicated, difficult position to be placed in,” Chard said.
Shirley Leung of the Globe staff contributed to this report.
Diti Kohli can be reached at diti.kohli@globe.com. Follow her @ditikohli_.