Junior Faculty

To the Editors of the Crimson:

I am rather dismayed at the form a lengthy conversation with your reporter Susan Glasser took in her article "Transient Pleasures, Pitfalls," in the Crimson's commencement issue (June 9).

The gist of my comments was the widely shared and hardly controversial view that a junior appointment in the history department is absolutely comparable to one at institutions that Harvard usually considers its peers except for one crucial difference. That is, of course, that in terms of tenure, it is a dead end, as the practice if not the theory of the department's promotion shows. From this stems the malaise that the junior faculty suffers. In other respects, teaching load, pay and so forth, there is nothing in particular to gripe about.

One of the questions asked was whether the junior faculty was especially marginalized in the department. They are not, as I told your reporter. The department as a whole tends not to function as a scholarly or personal community--not surprisingly for a large institution in an urban setting with distractions and other communities aplenty. The junior faculty are in this sense no more marginalized than the senior, there is no particular exclusion reserved for them. Even assuming that I used the phrasing attributed to me, the way it was set in context certainly distorted my point, that in this respect there was no appreciable difference among the ranks.

Finally, the last snippet of our conversation to make it into the article also came out on its head. The committee of which I am a member was used as an illustration of the department's recognition that there is a problem and of its good intentions. Whether they are merely good intentions is a matter the future will decide, not one I prejudged in my conversation with Ms. Glasser. Peter Baldwin   Professor of History