Highlights of C.U.U.T. Report

Dean Ferguson's memorandum appears to assume that the University has no choice in the matter. It treats the existing policy as the dictate of an implacable budget rather than as the result of a choice among alternatives. At least one alternative, it must be evident, there is. The University may seek to assure itself only that it is going to be able to pay the prospective appointee his salary as an associate professor, leaving to the future the question of whether it either can or wants to appoint him to a full professorship. On financial grounds there would appear to be little to choose between the two policies. The choice, essentially, is an educational one.

The present policy will inevitably cause a substantial and Immediate damage to the educational effectiveness of the University. The damage is two-fold: direct and indirect. Directly, the policy injures the University by requiring it forthwith to dispense with the services of experienced teachers and to replace them with inexperienced teachers.... Indirectly, the policy injures the University by making it less attractive both to students and to younger teachers.

Slide Rule and Competition

...Between receipt of an associate professorship and retirement men die. They inherit money. They get tired. Or they are offered more attractive positions elsewhere.... Whenever under the new policy an intrinsically desirable teacher is turned out of Harvard and thereafter (within "the next five or ten years") a permanent appointee in his Department ceases to teach prior to retirement, the University will have been unnecessarily damaged.... But the present policy results in automatic dismissal of actual teachers of known value in favor of hypothetical teachers of unknowable value. Surely it is possible to frame a policy less blind and accidental in its operation. The solution lies in appointing men to vacancies in associate professorships as they actually arise rather than to vacancies in full professorships as they are predicted to arise.

...What is in question is solely the appointment of a larger number of associate professors to compete as equals, over a period of years, for a lesser number of full professorships. Under such a policy, no one would be tagged as destined from the outset to be given a full professorship, and none need be tagged as destined to be denied it. Under such a policy, disappointments when they come would be gradual, and would be founded at least on permanence rather than prediction. We cannot believe that the avoidance of such disappointments ought to be the lodestar of a tenure system.

Benefit to Young and Old

...the assurance of permanency at Harvard would be the best possible recommendation for an appointment in another university; and men lacking a guarantee of further advance here would consider seriously the offer of such an appointment. Thus, it would not be surprising if in the long run the policy here urged actually escaped the objection stated at the outset--of a substantial surplus of permanent associate professors. By the same token the proposed policy would better rather than lessen the chances of younger teachers not yet up for permanent appointment. This would be true, indeed, even if the percentage of associate professors staying on at the University remained unchanged. For an increase in the number of permanent appointees in the younger ages could in no event decrease the rate of exodus or advancement. The rate remaining the same, the number of new permanent places on the contrary would somewhat increase.

The basic logical fault of the policy assumed as inescapable in Dean Ferguson's memorandum is that it undertakes to postulate present action on the basis of essentially unpredictable future events. Out of an apparent overweening fear of the future, it forges gratuitous shackles for the present.