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Andrew HeiskellAndrew Heiskell
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Session:         Page of 824

Board of Oversees. Of course, by that time, going back to your previous question, I knew all the players pretty well, from Derek Bok on down, and we were all the same boat, and had the same goal in mind.

Q:

Being, you mean, to raise money?

Heiskell:

No, well--to try to make the oversees function better. And we did tend to clarify, we did clarify their purpose in terms of the committee structure: there'd be a committee on institutional policy; a committee on social studies; there was a committee on--I forget. There were six or seven committees, and each committee got the feeling that it had a reasonably clear purpose. And they started to function quite well. The overseers as a whole, with thirty bodies and an entity as vast, disparate, uncoordinated as Harvard is--it's very difficult for thirty people to address themselves to the university as a whole somehow. You just have to break it up into component parts. And ultimately, I think, we got the overseers to realize that they were not running the university and that was not what they were there for. They were there to oversee the different functions that were going on, which, by the way, includes overseeing the Corporation, of which I will speak in a minute.

Q:

But does oversight include power, actual authority?

Heiskell:

Well, that's what always bothered them. They felt they should have actual authority, when they don't have actual authority





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