From the Harvard Crimson: Harvard is quietly asking donors for $10 million gifts to establish new endowed professorships in a sweeping bid to reshape its faculty under the banner of “viewpoint diversity,” according to two people familiar with the initiative. The campaign, driven by Harvard’s top brass, aims to raise several hundred million dollars to support a new cohort of professors. If successful, the funding could bring dozens of faculty members to campus and drastically shift Harvard’s academic makeup. University officials have pitched the effort to major donors — conservative and liberal alike — as a way to broaden ideological representation across Harvard, two people said. But the fundraising target has repeatedly shifted after pushback from donors who viewed the scale as too ambitious, one person said.
Harvard Provost John F. Manning ’82 — the University’s second-highest administrator and a prominent conservative legal scholar — has led the effort, according to two people. Still, Harvard has carefully framed the project as a general push for “viewpoint diversity,” rather than a politically aligned initiative. Under a model being proposed, new hires would not be housed in a standalone institute. Instead, they would be appointed at the University level and embedded across schools and departments, per two people...
Full story at https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2026/4/15/harvard-donors-viewpoint-diversity/.
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From the Harvard Crimson: Harvard Provost John F. Manning ’82 pushed back Friday against a central demand of the University’s graduate student union, warning that a proposal to require third-party arbitration in Title IX cases could violate federal law. In an email to affiliates co-signed by Executive Vice President Meredith L. Weenick ’90, Manning wrote that the Harvard Graduate Students Union-United Auto Workers proposal would establish “distinct and separate set of non-discrimination, harassment, and anti-bullying processes” for union members — a system he said would conflict with both federal Title IX regulations and University policy requiring consistent procedures. The message, sent four days before the union’s planned strike, reflects Harvard’s firm posture on several major sticking points in negotiations that have stretched more than a year.
...[A] strike would mark a significant ratcheting up of an already tense bargaining cycle, marked by ongoing conflict over union representation. Negotiations began on uncertain terms, as conflict over bargaining observation resulted in the parties proceeding without ground rules. At the bargaining table, Harvard’s negotiators have responded to proposals for distinct non-discrimination and anti-bullying procedures by moving to standardize procedures across the University. The move would centralize control over reported cases and strip some existing protections, including the ability for the union to negotiate over proposed changes to non-discrimination policy. The divide extends to compensation. The University’s offer falls well below the union’s proposal, which calls for a roughly 74 percent increase for teaching fellows and a standardized $55,000 base salary for research assistants across disciplines, followed by annual five percent raises.
If the union moves forward with a strike on Tuesday, Manning and Weenick wrote that Harvard has begun contingency plans to maintain operations. They emphasized that while faculty and students may support the union, they will be expected to meet their academic obligations...
Full story at https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2026/4/18/manning-hgsu-strike/.
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