Children in PBHA's Boston refugee youth enrichment program.
Two years of heated controversy over the future of Phillips Brooks House Association (PBHA) may finally be ending in compromise. Central to negotiations between PBHA and Harvard administrators has been the degree of autonomy that PBHA should have from the College, given that the student public-service organization operates out of a Harvard building with Harvard-paid staff and liability coverage.
The University has argued that, because it could be held liable for PBHA's actions, the organization should be accountable to Harvard. To this end, the College had insisted that PBHA appoint associate dean for public service Judith Kidd its executive director (see "Phillips Brooks House," July-August, page 90). Of particular concern to Harvard are the student-run summer programs, including camps for children that involve transporting participants in student volunteer-driven vans.
Students in PBHA had balked at the prospect of Kidd as executive director, expressing their preference during the search process for incumbent director Greg Johnson '72. When Johnson didn't get the job, student participants in the search process felt betrayed; some wondered whether the original report that recommended the consolidation of two public-service administrator positions into one (the job Kidd now holds) had been designed to remove individuals, not people (see "Public-service Passions," January-February, page 27). PBHA volunteers called Kidd a fine administrator, but wanted someone with more hands-on public-service experience to replace Johnson. When dean of the College Harry Lewis '68 named Kidd director of Phillips Brooks House (PBH)-thereby putting her in charge of the building, the salaried staff, and the University-supported services-PBHA rewrote its bylaws to state that the director of PBH would not automatically become director of PbHA, as formerly. PbHA also created a board of trustees designed to include several Harvard administrators serving in an ex-officio capacity. But College officials objected to the presence of non-student voting members on the board because that violates a College rule designed to ensure the autonomy of student organizations. They threatened to kick PBHA out of Phillips Brooks House unless it complied with College rules.
The agreement finally worked out in July includes a number of compromises. First, the dean of students has granted permission for non-student PBHA board members to vote on policy decisions for a 15-month trial period. Second, PBHA and the College have agreed that a subcommittee of board members will nominate a new PBHA executive agent, who must be acceptable to both Dean Kidd and the president of PBHA. The agent will have dual reporting responsibilities: to the board on matters of program design, management, and long-term planning; and to the assistant dean for public service in matters of risk management, fiscal integrity, and compliance with legal and insurance requirements. The agreement also specifies that PBHA and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences will jointly share the employment cost of the PBHA executive agent.
Continued voting rights for non-student PBHA board members, according to the agreement, are contingent on the successful maintenance of PBHA's "programmatic autonomy under student leadership" and of Harvard's authority in safety, fiscal and legal matters. The agreement specifies that because PBHA student officers may elect and remove trustees from the board, they constitute the principal governing body of the organization.
At press-time, PBHA president Andrew J. Ehrlich '96 ('97) expressed confidence that the board of trustees would approve the new agreement at their August meeting. Nevertheless, some PBHA student leaders are uneasy with it. Vice-president Hahrie Han '97 says she did not sign the agreement as planned because "the dual reporting structure was problematic," and reminiscent of PBHA's structure when Greg Johnson was in charge. She also points out the potential for future conflicts of interest, citing as an example the Committee on Economic Change, a PBHA program of the late 1980s that actively helped Harvard's clerical and technical workers organize a union, which the University strongly opposed. Han believes that the agreement "will work only as a transitional step" towards greater autonomy, and talks about a future when "PBHA could hire its own staff, pay its own insurance, and pay rent to the University as a self-directed human-service agency." That would require financial independence, which PBHA cannot afford at this time.
