Brinkley: Part 1

To the Editors of The Crimson:

I was dismayed and saddened to read in The New York Times that Associate Professor Alan Brinkley has been denied tenure. It seems unfair that with a stroke of his pen Dean of the Faculty A. Michael Spence can add Brinkley's name to the list of other stellar junior faculty members like Bradford Lee, Robert Watson, and Paul Starr who now grace the halls of universities like UCLA and Princeton after being refused tenure at Harvard.

Is it not enough for an associate professor like Brinkley to teach classes so popular that every year a lottery is held to keep admission to 500 people, to write books which win prestigious prizes, and to brave the perils of dining hall food to lunch with students? Does an ambitious junior faculty member at Harvard have to be as old the institution itself in order to gain tenure there? Melanie Cohen '86