Excarpts From Open Letter to Committee of Eight

We regretfully report that misgivings on the part of younger members of the Faculty, as well as of many older members, are more widespread and deeply rooted than over. The past few weeks have seen an unparalleled furry of administrative section in declared application of the principles of your report. The most debatable parts of the report have been put into precipitate operation: others have been neglected.

Method of Adoption

Subsequent events make it relevant to refer, at the outset, to the methods by which the report was considered an adopted. . . . Group discussion of the report was actually confined to four informal meetings to each of which some portion of the instructing staff had been invited. Each of these meetings offered those in attendance their sole occasion to discuss all the various recommendations of the report. At each meeting queries and doubts on many points notably on the proposed abolition of the assistant professorship--seemed at least as evident as signs of approval. No specific motions, however, were entertained. Each meeting was prefaced with the statement that votes would not be taken; and particular requests for a vote were refused. The sole effort to evoke or appraise opinion as a whole consisted of the statement, made at each meeting, that failure to declare objection by letter would be taken as constituting approval of all the recommendations.

In putting into effect the recommendations of the report there has been still less effort to foster the development and expression of Faculty opinion than there was in adopting it. . . . it is safe to say that no other period in the history of the University has seen so many final decisions, respecting the future of such promising scholars, reached in so short a time. . . . To the fact of such decisions no objection, of course, can be made. But merely to state their number and the speed with which they have been reached is to state also that the deliberative procedures envisaged by your report could not have been followed.

Abuses In Application

The tenure provisions of your report, in their negative aspects, have been put into application with remorseless retroactivity. In at least two clear instances men of undisputed capacity as scholars and as teachers have been given terminating appointments on the sole ground that they have already served the University more than eight years and that the budget does not permit their present advance to permanent rank.

We are unable to reconcile these actions with acceptance of your recommendation that the reclassification proposed "shall not, if adopted, automatically alter the status of the existing personnel as regards either rank or tenure, but that the status of each individual affected shall be separately considered by the administration and the department concerned, with due regard for commitments now in existence."

Respect for the spirit of your recommendations as to tenure would seem to have required that scholars of unquestioned capacities who have served the University more than ten years should be offered the opportunity of permanent appointment--either at their present salaries or without promise of advance beyond the normal salary of an associate professor--even if such action were to be regarded as exceptional.

Decline in Faculty's Younger Ranks

The present course of University policy suggests the possibility of an ironic solution to "the problem of the younger teacher" at Harvard: namely, not to have any younger teachers at all at Harvard, except those who are still seeking their doctorates.

That this possibility is not chimerical is shown by the present situation in the Department of Economics. In 1935-36 a large part of the undergraduate teaching in this department was being done by four assistant professors and eight faculty instructors--that is, by the experienced non-permanent members of the staff. Since that time a few of these men have gained permanent positions, others have departed for jobs elsewhere. In the meantime the intermediate ranks which they once occupied have not been filled. The result is striking: where there were four assistant professors and eight faculty instructors, there will be next year probably one faculty instructor--at most one assistant professor and one faculty instructor.

At a time when an increasingly large share of the energies of the permanent staff is being drained off into the work of the Graduate School of Public Administration, the effectiveness of the Department is thus crippled and the needs of the undergraduate body gravely neglected.

Current administrative policy, it must be evident, is doubly calculated to strip Harvard of this intermediate group of its instructing staff. On the one hand, teachers of proved capacity are discharged for no other reason than that they have already taught effectively for eight years. On the other hand, teachers of developing capacity are given every possible incentive, unintentional as well as intentional, not to crowd the eight-year limit. These losses are being tragically multiplied by a growing conviction, which no one can welcome, that an appointment in the University for whatever period--even if can be secured--is less and less to be desired.

How the essential functions of the University can continue, without being seriously curtailed and crippled by the departure of teachers who have built up important undergraduate courses and sustained the major duties of the tutorial system, is a problem which now presents almost hopeless difficulties to many heads of departments.

Surely the first requisite of wise administration in a University is the avoidance of needless frictions and serious mistakes by a regular practice of consulting, as a group, those who are best qualified to form and express an opinion. The legalistic iteration that in matters of personnel a department acts only "as an informal group to whom the administration has turned for advice" is satisfactory neither as an interpretation of the carefully defined provisions of your report nor as an assurance that its potentialities for clarity and harmony will be realized.