Justice for Sandel

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR Michael J. Sandel deserves congratulations for gaining tenure in the Government Department. So too do the Government Department and President Bok, whose decisions made Sandel the first junior faculty member to receive tenure in the Government Department in a decade and one of a handful of junior faculty members in the humanities and social sciences to garner a permanent post during the same period.

It is especially pleasing to find that the one exception in recent years to the Department's de facto refusal to tenure from within is a stellar teacher whose course, Moral Reasoning 22: "Justice", is a staple of many undergraduate academic diets. Sandel not only earns top CUE guide ratings year after year, but is also a professor whose presence at lectures would not be redundant if his notes were typed, xeroxed and passed out at the start of the semester. He makes teaching a process, carefully engaging his students in questions of political theory. Learning is therefore not something done passively, but rather part of a process of discovery.

That Sandel could establish himself as a first-rate political philosopher while still in his thirties--and thus win the approval of his department--is indicative of his unusual talent. It also reflects, however, the barriers which junior faculty members outside the hard sciences face. Although scholars of the hard sciences may establish their reputations while young through stellar empirical work, in the more subjective social sciences and humanities, esteem is won much more slowly.

Sandel's case, then, portends well for the possiblity of increasing the number of promotions of Harvard junior faculty members, but it does not necessarily guarantee it. Nor does it vindicate Dean of the Faculty A. Michael Spence's plan to lower the hurdles which junior faculty members must face in seeking tenure. Members of the Government Department and President Bok were all quick to point to high quality of Sandel's scholarship and how the young professor would have won tenure regardless of the University's newly articulated desire to tenure from within. That a young scholar as uniquely well-established in his field as Sandel won tenure here is simultaneously cause for rejoicing and an indication that barriers to the success of Dean Spence's plan remain.