The Dunlop Report

THOUGH the 48 recommendations of the Dunlop Committee are in themselves enough to keep the Faculty talking most of next fall, the specific suggestions for change are far less remarkable than the tone of the report in which they are offered. For while proposing ways for the University to hire and keep top-notch Faculty, the Committee has also delivered a massive dose of plain talk on Harvard's place in American education and her prospects for the future.

"For a half-century," the first paragraph of a ten-page chapter on The Harvard Community states, "Harvard was believed by many to occupy a unique position in the American system of higher education; and that position no longer seems as secure as it once did." The Dunlop Report pictures the University in 1900 as a magically cohesive community--a haven of the intellectual freedom which was being threatened elsewhere and a peculiarly ascetic institution whose members all proudly rejected the market mentality.

Harvard's decline from this ultimate attractiveness to the nation's scholars is explained in five ways:

* As the University grew, Faculty members naturally became more isolated from each other. With a much larger non-tenured staff, most of whom have little prospect of winning a permanent place here, the University suddenly has "a sizeable transient teaching population."

* Cambridge has changed from an idyllic suburb to a crowded--and, for many, unattractive--city. In 1900 every tenured Faculty member lived within three-quarters of a mile of the Square; rapidly increasing numbers now settle in the suburbs. A whole set of town-gown hostilities developed as the University lost political control of the City after World War I.

* Easy travel, multiple opportunities for government service, and foundation and government research grants have physically detached Faculty from the University community and "encouraged the trend toward setting a monetary equivalent for all the fractions of the Faculty member's time."

* Scholarship has become more specialized and therefore more impersonal. Deans and Department heads don't have the knowledge to understand highly technical research projects of Faculty members here.

* Academic freedom can be taken for granted at many places besides Harvard, and technology--microfilm, the airplane--makes it less urgent for a scholar to live near the most established centers of scholarship.

THE Dunlop Committee explicitly rejects the buoyancy of its predecessor, the Committee of Eight, which in 1938 exhorted the University to "make a conscious effort to offset the natural tendency to academic isolation and the narrow perpetuation of its own internal tradition." That charge is an anachronism, and this report says that the University must consolidate its strengths rather than expand in a futile attempt to cover all fields of scholarship.

This alarming view of the erosion of Harvard's eminence introduces the Committee's specialized suggestions on what the University must do to attract and retain outstanding Faculty: enter the market for scholars with a bit more managerial shrewdness.

The Committee's researches showed that older Faculty members (those past 45) are essentially outside the problem. They tend to have firmly planted their roots by this time so that Harvard has relatively little chance of attracting men over 45 to the Faculty and conversely is in little danger of having its older senior Faculty pirated away by offers of better positions.

Younger tenured Faculty (ages 35-45) are another story. While Harvard's average salary for these men is the second highest in the country, most of her competitors offer a substantially higher maximum. Harvard has traditionally deplored the "star system" and pays all its Faculty of equal age and rank nearly the same salary. While unwilling to abandon this principle, the Dunlop Committee is sure that some exceptions are in order if Harvard is to win battles for younger men and thus recommends "some greater degree of administrative flexibility be regarded as appropriate in individual cases."

The report comes down hard on the University's present treatment of its untenured Faculty, and the top priorities of the report are unmistakably abolishing the title of Instructor and raising salaries in this range. The Dunlop Committee recommendations (if adopted) won't make it any easier for junior faculty to win tenure, but they should make Harvard more attractive to those who are here only for a few years. The road to full professorship will still in most cases be eight years long--with associate professors reduced to something like the 50-50 chance for tenure the Committee of Eight envisioned for assistant professors. Those who leave after three-or five-year terms as assistant professors will be able to use the more prestigious title to negotiate for jobs elsewhere.

Dunlop's Committee recommends few changes in the mechanics of recruitment. It endorses the use of ad hoc committees (groups of scholars outside the department who are called in to approve or reject a department's candidate for a tenured position). But the report deplores what it bluntly calls "the glacial tempo" at which these committees operate. In the interim between first contacts and final ad hoc committee approval a man is often offered huge salary increases by his present employer and turns down Harvard. The report documents in exhaustive detail the complicated recommendations for multiple appointments or departmental restructuring that have started to come out of the ad hoc committees in recent years. Dunlop would like to see more committees given general mandates so that lists of candidates could be mobilized by a single committee and departments spared the time wasted while committees consider one candidates at a time.

WHILE the balance of the Dunlop Committee's study and recommendations fix on straightforward improvements in salary and benefits, the report concedes that Harvard cannot rely on these devices to maintain the quality of its Faculty. "If you're going to have a distinguished Faculty," Dunlop remarked Monday, "that means that three-quarters of them could pull up stakes and make more money elsewhere." Harvard professors are routinely bombarded with more lucrative offers, and those who do leave, according to a Committee survey, do so for reasons other than salary.

And so though the Committee demonstrates the myth of Harvard's uniqueness and says "there's no turning the clock back," it implies that only the intangible aura of the community can save the University's standards of excellent. The chapter on The Harvard Community concludes with the vague but pregnant advice: "It is appropriate to ask whether it lies within its power to make Cambridge a more attractive setting for life as well as for work. . . . By providing a milieu encouraging to the development of a variety of subcommittees it could widen the options for involvement open to the Faculty. And it could help to generate a sense of common intellectual interest that might transcend the differences among its members."

"If ties of the individual to the University are weakened further, the costs of competing in the open market for the services of a faculty of quality may be far higher than can now be reckoned," the report warns ominously. But the Committee is as conservative in the measures it recommends for rebuilding community as it is bold in defining the problem.

A NUMBER of influences on Harvard's attractiveness are not treated at all. The most disappointing omission (at least to students) is the lack of any detailed treatment of undergraduate or graduate teaching. Though the report concedes that Harvard's "capacity to attract students of high quality," is crucial to attracting faculty, it goes no further. It does not consider how the attractiveness of Harvard to Faculty might change if standards of recruitment altered--specifically if more emphasis were placed on getting men eager and able to teach.

A man's skill as a teacher now has virtually nothing to do with his chances of getting a tenured position at Harvard. The ad hoc committee system has considerable advantages of impartiality and expertise, but as one veteran of six or seven of these said last week, it makes a man's appointment hinge on what he has written and on what his colleagues say about him, since the committees usually have no information on his competence as a teacher, especially if he is at an outside university.

There is no particular malice in the Committee's exclusion of the issue of teaching undergraduates; it did not consider the opposite possibility either--converting Harvard to the style of Columbia or Chicago where most of the top professors do not teach undergraduates. The report simply accepted as a given the present balance of undergraduate and graduate instruction.

The structure and internal government of departments gets slightly fuller treatment, but the Committee here is very circumspect in its recommendations. It acknowledges that the alienation of junior from senior Faculty, their "exclusion from discussions of curriculum . . . and social isolation" is "the most painful aspect of their life at Harvard."

But the tradition of departmental autonomy is inviolable here, and predictably the Committee does not try to tell the History or Government departments how they should behave toward their junior faculty. It recommends merely "that each department review its practice as they affect this relationship," and that Dean Ford request the results of these reports from certain departments. Instructors cannot vote now in the Faculty; and the Committee would retain that rule, requiring three years of service from an assistant professor before he is given the vote.

In many places the report latches on to the quickness of Harvard's growth, revealing with a certain awe that the number of tenured appointments has risen by 50 per cent since 1951 and questioning what governs the pattern of this growth. The Committee says that the direction of future expansion is "central to the future strength to the Faculty," but does not presume to say directly how future appointments ought to be distributed.

Instead the Committee recommends a system of continuous data-gathering, so that educational goals can be constantly balanced with exact information on financial resources. Also Dean Ford is encouraged to prepare periodic reports on the departments--rather like HPC audits from the opposite end of a department's operations. The report recommends that the Dean of the Faculty be given "even greater power" to influence the allocation of new professorships.

Only obliquely does the Committee suggest the direction in which Harvard should be channeling its resources. One significant recommendation asks the University to budget money "to redress in part the vast imbalance in the availability of outside research funds." "I wouldn't say we should be simply counter-cyclical," Dunlop said Monday, but clearly this clause is an attempt to protect the Humanities at a time when federal funds and foundation money are flowing into the Natural and Social Sciences. "We cannot change the world in five seconds," Dunlop said, "but we may set precedents which others will choose to follow."

THE COMMITTEE'S most delicate problem in suggesting ways to strengthen the community was what to say about Cambridge. The University's relations with the City have been improving in recent years, and there have been signs of a thaw in the Cambridge School Committee's traditional coldness to offers of help from the Ed School. But the CCA committeemen who have consistently voted for Harvard help are the minority on the Committee now and any slap at the quality of Cambridge schools would be disastrously impolitic. At the same time, the exodus to Belmont and Lexing ton in the last 15 years has been led by professors with school-age children, and the report could not be silent on the education of Faculty children. Still it was equivocal.

If the Committee ever seriously considered recommending a university school for Harvard, there is no hint of it in the report. In fact it says specifically that "there is no case" for the idea. The report calls much of Harvard's hostility to the Cambridge schools ill-informed; the best of the city's elementary schools are as good as those in the suburbs, it says. And it recommends that, "if invited," the University should provide teachers and advisers on released time.

But there is one punch at Cambridge mingled with this praise and encouragement. The report calls the quality of Cambridge high schools at present "unsatisfactory" and recommends that the University expand its loan program to provide money for Faculty who want to send their children to a private secondary school. The loan program, by subsidizing local private schools, could have the same effect as establishing a University school. This change, together with University building on its Shady Hill property, might concentrate a bit more of the Harvard population in Cambridge.

A CLOUD of financial restraint hangs over the entire report. Present Federal aid to education is now geared to developing new "centers of excellence" around the country, and the report seems to assume that the current financial squeeze on established private college is going to get worse. With its final paragraph, the report delivers the coup de grace to the notion that Harvard can be universally excellent: "The Committee recommends that the Faculty concentrate upon a limited number of areas in which it can provide top-quality leadership rather than seek to achieve a full spectrum of appointments in every department and academic specialty. Given financial constraints, the Faculty cannot hope to cover all fields and specialties without risking a dilution of quality. On a departmental level we endorse cooperative arrangements with other institutions in the area to reduce duplication and to provide a more effective community of scholars."

That conclusion probably means that the next few years will find the University linking with M.I.T. and B.U. to cover fields in which Harvard is weakest and to start programs in undeveloped areas of scholarship. The recommendation also sounds the note of "community," which the Committee once again insists must be strengthened if the University is to remain excellent. But how? This group of seven professors, brooding and sifting through data for a year, only began to answer.