Susan Suleiman

Junior faculty members don't usually have much of a chance of getting tenure at Harvard, but Susan Rubin Suleiman, the University's most recent internal promotion, seemed like a sure bet.

"We brought her in as an associate professor with the intention of tenuring her when she was qualified," says Romance Languages and Literatures Department Chairman Jules Brody. "We needed someone very badly in her field," he explains.

Suleiman, a specialist in 20th-century French literature, came up through the junior ranks in just over two years.

"If I had not felt as good as I did about the way the department was handling things," she says. She might have accepted a tenure offer from the University of North Carolina last year.

And if Brody had not made a policy of hiring up-and-coming young academics. She might still be in a tenured position at Occidental College enjoying the Los Angeles sun.

But Suleiman, who received her Ph.D. from Harvard in 1969, gave up both tenures. "Basically, temperamentally, I am an East Coast person," she explains, adding. "I had a great fondness for my memories of Cambridge and Harvard."

Just as important for Suleiman's choice was Brody's strategy of rebuilding a department that five years ago suffered what Suliman calls "a problem of what one might call understaffing."

"We try to find the younger people--35 to 45--who right now are extremely good...but who have not reached their peak," says Brody. "You look around the field and you see that the really interesting work is being done by people like this," he adds.

The Harvard policy of hiring the best in the world often means getting big-name stars, which Brody says is wrong-headed: "The problem with hiring a best shot is that their peak sometimes turns out to be a plateau."

Professor Barbara E. Johnson (tenured last year), and Associate Professor Jean-Marie Apostolides (coming up for tenure in the next several years) and Suleiman are all the result of Brody's search for new blood.

Suleiman at 44 the oldest of this group serves as the department's unofficial liaison with France. "She is our link to the contemporary French literary scene," says Brody, adding. "She is really up to date and in touch with what is going on there."

One offshoot of this role is that Suleiman regularly gets visiting French literary figures to come and lecture at Harvard. "I happen to enjoy it," she says, adding that the role was not foisted upon her.

Suleiman says she will travel to Paris to maintain these contacts during the second half of her year-long sabbatica, which began this week. The main project of her leave of absence will be a book tentatively titled The Problems of Avant Garde Writing. The work is intended to complement her last book Authoritarian Fictions, which analyzed the political and ideological "message" novels against which the avant-gardists are rebelling.

One of these avant-garde groups is the "new French feminists," to whose ideas Suleiman is very sympthetic. As a member of the Women's Studies Committee. "She has made a really important contribution," says Assistant Professor of Government Ethel Klein. Suleiman and Professor of Hindu Religion Diana L. Eck "are concerned about women on campus trying to set role models and being taken seriously," Klein adds.

Suleiman says she thinks the three tenures of women last semester were "more of a coincidence than anything else," but credits Harvard for taking affirmative steps, both in hiring and in women's studies: "When Harvard does not think it is in the forefront of things, it acts."

Born in Hungary. Suleiman came to the United States when she was 11, and graduated from Barnard College in 1960 with a B.A. in--of allthings--Chemistry. But at Harvard's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, she began to study and teach French literature, earning a departmental teaching prize in 1965. While finishing her Ph.D. thesis, Suleiman taught at Columbia University for three years, then moved out West. From 1976 to 1981, she taught at Occidental College in Los Angeles, where she gained tenure.

Lured back to Harvard in 1981, Suleiman taught literary theory and a year-long course on 20th century French fiction. The latter, French 132a, "The Realist Mode," and French 132b. "The Experimental Mode," are highly praised by students. According to class members. Suleiman graded and wrote comments on all 60 students' papers, and took the trouble to learn everyone's name. "She is extremely friendly--very approachable," says one student, Elizabeth E. Porter'86.

The modern literature course had previously been taught by a medieavalist and a poetry expert, and the introduction of Suleiman represents the last stage of the rebuilding of the department. Says Brody: "We have reached a plateau at which we are very comfortable, for a change."