Faculty Allocation System Ignores Popularity Trends, Favors Consistency, Long-Range Plan

More than half the College concentrates in the Social Sciences; just over one quarter of the permanent members of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences teaches in the Social Sciences.

One quarter of the College concentrates in the Natural Sciences; 42 percent of the permanent Faculty teaches in the Natural Sciences.

Why is there such an obvious discrepancy between apparent demand and allocation of top-level instruction?

These are the reasons: (1) instruction is given by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, not by a college faculty, which means the College's needs are not all-important; (2) the number of permanent appointments allowed each department is frozen at its "historical" size.

As a "university college" Harvard has many advantages over the independent college. The intellectual level of the community is higher. Specialists can be retained economically by being shared by the college and one or more graduate schools. Undergraduates can take seminars primarily for graduates, offered by graduate schools (This practice is much more common at Yale, where undergraduates major in such subjects as drama which are taught only at graduate schools).

On the other hand, graduate schools bleed off much of a university college's manpower. The man who becomes an expert soon spends much of his time in small graduate seminars.

The Social Sciences suffers a heavier loss than either the Natural Sciences or the Humanities. For in addition to the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, which draws on all three fields, the Social Sciences surrenders an enormous amount of energy to the Graduate School of Public Administration. The Natural Sciences gains more from the graduate schools than it loses, for the schools of Medicine, Dental Medicine, and Public Health provide a large number of top-level instructors for limited use in advanced and specialized courses.

The "historical" size of a department as an operative concept is peculiar to Harvard. The nation's oldest institution of higher education does not wish to be over-influenced by trends, by changing emphasis and intensity of student interest.

Example: Soc. Rel.

An excellent example of this policy in action is the social relations field. The Social Relations Department was established after the war to include the now extinct Sociology Department and portions of the Anthropology and Psychology Departments. Before the war, these three departments together averaged 237 concentrators, or 6.6 percent of all concentrators. In the last three years, the social relations field has averaged 547 concentrators a year, 13.2 percent of the present total--exactly double the pre-war figure.

The pre-war field had 12 permanent appointees and the fractional services of nine or ten others. The present field has 15 permanent appointments. It will get has no more within the forseeable future because the Faculty of Arts and Sciences is not convinced "the Social Relations boom" is permanent.

If the social relations field maintains its high number of concentrators, it can do so only at the expense of other departments, since the enrollment of the College has been fixed by administrative decree. But it will not increase its allotment of permanent appointments at the expense of other departments. It will have to wait for new money, in the form of either endowed chairs or gifts to the University for unrestricted purposes.

In 1939-40 the University adopted a new system of appointments to full and associate professorships--the two ranks with permanent tenure. Its conception and its mechanics were largely the work of William C. Graustein '11, professor of Mathematics, an outstanding geometrician. Graustein was an extraordinary individual who brought to administrative problems a precise and mathematical approach. He made out the course catalogue each year, almost as a hobby, for he enjoyed wrestling with its major difficulty: to schedule at different hours the courses which are most likely to interest any particular student, while at the same time not giving any teacher too rough a program.

In the spring of 1939 Graustein and Provost Buck, then an associate professor of History, were appointed assistant deans of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Before the year was out, Graustein died in an automobile accident.

The appointment system is very simple. In 1939 the Faculty determined the "historical" size of each department. The exact details of the process are shrouded in mystery. "Historical" size depended to a certain degree upon size at the time, and to a small degree upon number of students and concentrators. Endowments played a role: for instance, the Department of Semitic Languages and History had two chairs endowed for over $118,000. Although the department then offered only nine courses for a total of 38 undergraduates and graduates, to throw out one of the professors would have meant giving up completely a large endowment fund.

In assigning definite figures of "historical" size, the Faculty did not cut any department. Where there were inconsistencies, it added.

It was also determined that the average length of a permanent appointment is 34 years: that the average age of appointment to an associate professorship is 34 and the average retirement age 68. The figure 34 was then divided by the number of permanent positions for each department. The result is simply the number of years between appointments to a department.

By this method a department whose "historical" size is 34 permanent members appoints a new one every year, regardless of whether none, one, or ten members, has retired during the year. A department of 17 permanent members appoints a new one every two years; a department of two every 17 years; etc. In case of sudden death or excessively premature resignation or retirement, a "call appointment" is made, which does not affect the periodical replenishment of the staff.

The new system won favor with the administration of the University and with the Faculty of Arts and Sciences for three reasons. First, it makes possible long-range budgeting by the departments and the Faculty. Second, after it has had time to take effect, it protects a department from having suddenly to replace a large portion of its permanent staff in one year or in two or three years because of bunching of retirements or deaths. And finally, it gives a man who wants a permanent appointment to any department an exact date on which to expect a vacancy to occur.

Two Big Hitches

But the system has two disadvantages, neither of which the University considers compelling at this time. Whereas a large department, which makes a permanent appointment every two or three years, can bring in outstanding scholars from all over the country whenever they turn up, the smaller department, with appointments only every five to ten years, has nothing to offer such men if they happen to be looking for permanent positions in a year when no appointments are scheduled.

The other disadvantage to adherence to the system is rigidity of the structure and distribution of the Faculty. The rapid growth in social relations is an example of a field which has not been given an allotment of permanent appointees comparable to its size.

Fine Arts offers the best example of the opposite trend. Before the war, Fine Arts averaged 2.7 percent of all concentrators; for the past three years it has averaged .9 percent, a decline to one third its former size. But it has nine full and associate professors, just as it did ten years ago.

In the twenties; the solution was easy: add more men to departments which attracted more students. But in the twenties the University was constantly expanding. The Houses were being built. Enrollment was going up. Wealthy graduates were endowing chairs and putting Harvard in their wills.

Now the College has decided to admit approximately 1,100 freshmen each year, which limits its enrollment to about 4,300. Tuition has had to go up to meet rising costs. Large fortunes are not being made with the same astonishing speed. Expansion is no longer the answer. There must be found some means of distributing the present Faculty to satisfy changing needs.

To attempt to accomplish this goal by office standards would be unsatisfactory the budget of a department were determined some combination of the number of its contractors and of students in its courses, the great variety which Harvard offers, and which considered by many one of its greatest strength would suffer drastically--if not be too destroyed. Also the next vacancy in any department could be summarily cancelled given to another department, instructors assistant professors could have no sense security at Harvard, and they would be quite to snap up permanent positions elsewhere.

Each department requires application of afferent standards. Courses in the Social science seem to demand less personal contact between student and professor. History, Government and Social Relations courses fill New Lecture Hall, Hunt Hall, and the ground floor Lecture room of Radcliffe's Longfellow Hall.

Course Size: Cause or Effect?

The rest of the College--the Natural Science and Humanities--operates with much small courses, and therefore much more personal attention. But which came first, the chickens the egg? Are Social Sciences courses inherently more adaptable to large lecture halls of other courses? Or is it merely that the great popularity of Social Sciences and the operatively small variety of courses of automatically make Social Sciences course large.

Are there only a limited number of course possible in any given field? Or do department merely split up the accessible knowledge their fields into the number of courses which their teachers are capable of giving?

If the answer to the first of each pair questions is completely affirmative, there no need for flexibility in the Faculty. But less the second questions can be answer definitely to the negative, a certain amount sensitivity to student box office demand necessary.

There are three choices: to continue with the present system, and investigate its results after another decade; to make appointments as vacancies appear and as many needs arise; or to find some system which retain the consistency of the present methods but allow for reasonable flexibility and sensitivity in apportionment of permanent, had paid instruction to fit the demands of times.