Venerable Senior Faculty Dig In

Through it all, the senior faculty has remained in control.

The challenge to faculty conservatism and entrenchment could be seen in almost every social science this year: in last fall's Visiting Committee report on the Economics Department, which criticized the department for the poor quality and content of its graduate program and for the "strong sense of alienation and frustration" among its nontenured faculty and graduate students; and in Nobel Prize-winner Wassily W. Leontief's resignation and citing of the report as a reason for his departure.

There were other challenges: In October, for example, the Sociology Department's junior faculty demanded a voice in hiring of non-tenured department members, and the right to attend and vote in departmental senior faculty meetings. In the History Department, the undergraduate curriculum committee continued its insistence on curriculum reform and the changing of the department's unpopular general examination in comparative history.

But in each case the challenges were at least partially neutralized, usually by a combination of reform and inertia--with reform kept within the limits of final senior faculty control of the departments.

Thus, while the Ec Department underwent its trauma over the Visiting Committee report and the loss of Leontief, the senior faculty voted to appoint Marxist economic historian William H. Lazonick to an assistant professorship in Economics.

In History, a committee of senior faculty stars thoroughly reformed the undergraduate curriculum in the spring, replacing the department's comparative generals with a senior exam on a specific period, and abolishing the pre-1600 required course for the classes of 1978 and after.

For its part, the Sociology Department continued to act as the newest and least entrenched of the social science departments. The senior faculty--after initial hesitation, followed by further prodding from the junior faculty--relented in February, and allowed the junior faculty to vote in department meetings.

And the department continued to honor its part of the University's commitment to affirmative action: with the hiring early this year of Ann Swidler '66, three of the department's five junior faculty are women, all of them hired in the last two years.

Still, in each department the power structure remains the same, even in Sociology. A venerable senior faculty still controls tenured appointments, curriculum and policy in every department--challenged by a small enclave group of radical social scientists and a larger, unorganized mass of graduate and undergraduate students.