Pusey Names Committee to Study How to Recruit and Hold Faculty

President Pusey announced at yesterday's Faculty meeting the formation of a committee to study the problems of selecting and retaining members of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

John T. Dunlop, David A. Wells Professor of Political Economy, will chair the seven-man committee. All the members are full professors.

Dean Ford yesterday compared the committee to the Committee of Eight, a 1939 group including Felix Frankfurter and Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr., which completely revamped the junior faculty structure. The Eight established the instructorship-assistant professorship sequence which has been the basis of junior faculty appointments for the past 28 years.

The new committee, Ford said, will probably review this junior faculty setup. Ford admitted that the number of desirable jobs opening up in other universities makes it difficult to hold onto non-tenured faculty members.

Harvard is one of the few schools left in which a student with his Ph.D. serves a three-year instructorship before becoming an assistant professor. As a result, a number of recent Harvard Ph.D.'s are turning down instructorships here for more lucrative assistant professorships elsewhere.

Faculty

Several department chairmen have complained about this and other personnel problems in discussions during the past year, Ford said.

Chairman Dunlop said last night the committee would certainly consider Harvard's appointment policies relative to other universities. One of the major problems, he explained, is that policies vary considerably from department to department at Harvard, making it impossible to directly compare Harvard with another school.

Committee of Seven

While Ford likens the Dunlop committee to the Committee of Eight -- he expects the new committee will eventually be called the Committee of Seven -- Dunlop pointed out that the President from time to time appoints a committee such as this one which do not all recommend such fundamental changes. Dunlop himself served on one in 1950, which decided to end the obligation of Faculty members to contribute a share of the money for their pension fund.

The 1939 committee was formed when the University appointed two men to "tenured" positions in Economics with termination dates, and 131 junior faculty members protested. The Eight reported a year later that a system with fewer non-tenured graduations was necessary to reduce tension between junior and senior Faculty members. "The misgivings of the junior personnel of the Faculty," they wrote, "cannot. . .be wholly explained by the natural friction between youth and middle age, or by the inevitable heart-burnings of a competitive system opera- ting under the exigencies of a frozen budget."

In addition to Dunlop, the members of the new Committee of Seven are Herschel C. Baker, professor of English; Merle Fainsod, Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor; Oscar Handlin, Charles Warren Professor of American History; George B. Kistiakowsky, Abbott and James Lawrence Professor of Chemistry; Edward S. Mason, Lamont University Professor; and J. C. Street, Professor of Physics