Quite so.
I’m not sure of the practice in USA, but in many countries university chaplains won’t even be employees of the university. They will be people employed in nearby places of worship who volunteer to be on campus for consultation for a few hours each week as part of their “community outreach” role.
I’m thinking maybe the university administrators don’t want to have to talk to all the chaplains on a regular basis so they ask the chaplains to elect a chief chaplain to act as a conduit. So yeah, when they say “elected unamiously” it might mean that he was the only volunteer and many of the unanimous votes were of the form “I don’t know who this guy is but I’m just happy it’s not me.”
The Guardian report describes him as “Harvard University’s new chief chaplain”, not the Divinity School’s chief chaplain.
In a high school setting, a comparable error would be referring to the person at the top of the volunteer chaplains’ telephone tree as the head of the social science department.
