With Little Hope of Tenure

When junior Faculty members-assistant and associate professors with-out tenure-arrive at Harvard, they move into their new offices and acquaint themselves with Widener Library.

Then they start searching for a new job.

"To put it plainly, I do not know anyone who is not looking at the job market, with different levels of intensity," says Nicola Di Cosmo, associate professor of Chinese and inner Asian history in East Asian Languages and Civilizations.

Academic jobs without tenure are always precarious. But the 200 junior professors currently in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) face a different predicament than their colleagues at other universities.

Most institutions hire junior professors directly into tenure-track positions. If they achieve promotion to full professor, they will gain the right to keep their academic appointment as long as they want it.

But Harvard does not have a tenure-track system. Generally, assistant professors in FAS receive contracts for five years. If they receive promotion to associate professor, they can stay an additional three years. After that period, they come up for tenure review.

Harvard's record of tenure from inside is well known in the academic world. In 1995-96, only 30 percent of all 30 tenure offers in FAS went to junior Faculty members already in the University; 33 percent of all tenure decisions in the previous five years appointed Harvard junior professors to tenured positions, according to this year's budget letter from Dean of FAS Jeremy R. Knowles.

Harvard's unique tenure system has numerous consequences, including allowing the University to run junior professors through a working trial before offering them lifetime employment.

But the system also creates a tense psychological atmosphere among junior Faculty members, many of whom, as Di Cosmo notes, consider their Harvard positions as temporary from the moment they arrive in Cambridge.

Psychological Warfare

The tenure statistics put a new spin on departmental politics. Junior Faculty members talk about the unlikelihood of receiving tenure "constantly," Margo I. Seltzer '83, associate professor of computer science, writes in an e-mail.

"It's usually perceived as quite a joke," Seltzer says. "In some departments, people just treat a junior Faculty slot as a 'fancy post-doc.'"

Some junior professors say the low probability of tenure doesn't concern them.

"[The tenure situation] is rarely discussed," Edward L. Glaeser, Sack associate professor of political economy, writes in an e-mail. Glaeser turned down other Ivy League job offers.

"Most people feel grateful to have the opportunity to learn here at Harvard," he says.

New professors without tenure quickly realize, if they didn't already, how limited their options are.

"We are, naturally, quite worried," says Alison Simmons, an assistant professor of philosophy. "A number of people feel that the best thing to do is to take another job before the tenure review rather than take the chance."

The constant pressure to secure a tenured promotion or find a new job can demoralize some junior Faculty members.

"Young Faculty talk about the system all the time," Theda Skocpol, a tenured professor of Government and Sociology, says in an e-mail.

Skocpol says Harvard's long, secretive tenure review process creates unnecessary stress for junior professors.

"The tenure system here-and the need to decide when to move, whether to be reviewed for promotion at all, or skip it-all of this takes a huge toll from our young Faculty, and from those of us on the senior Faculty who care enough to talk with people about how to handle the transitions and the decisions," she says.

Attracting New Professors

Given this atmosphere of uncertainty, how does Harvard attract quality junior Faculty members?

The answer lies in the University's traditional strengths: extensive research facilities and resources and an undergraduate body with a reputation for intellectual ability.

Strong departments, or nascent departments rising to prominence, are another attraction. Seltzer, who concentrated in computer science as an undergraduate in the College, says she took Harvard's job offer because the computer science department was just beginning to build a strong systems component.

"I decided that if Harvard succeeded in making itself a top-notch department, and I wasn't a part of it I'd regret it, so I took the plunge," she remembers.

Seltzer also credits the Harvard community as a draw.

"In my opinion, the answer is most definitely the quality of the undergraduate student body," she says.

But the University has other strengths on which to draw as well. In some fields, Harvard is the only institution, or one of a select few, offering Faculty positions in a prospective professor's specific field.

For Di Cosmo, who studies the premodern history of Chinese foreign relations, Harvard's offer in 1993 allowed him to teach both Inner Asian history and two rarely-studied languages, Manchu and Literary Mongolian.

"There was never any competition between Harvard and other universities simply because there isn't another position in the country that fits my case as perfectly as this one,"Di Cosmo says.

And some fields-such as North American archaeology-have a tight job market, which puts even non-tenure track job offerings at a premium.

Assistant Anthropology professor Elizabeth Chilton, who studies the archaeology of hunter-gatherer societies, particularly in New England, says as many as 300 aspiring professors apply for every academic job in the field.

Chilton says she chose Harvard after receiving three offers, none of which included tenure.

But had she been offered a tenure track position elsewhere, she says, "depending on what else [the offer] was, it would have been tough."

But in some cases, Harvard's tenure policies drive qualified junior Faculty into the arms of other institutions which are prepared to offer them better chances of advancement-a prospect that alarms some of Harvard's senior Faculty.

"Young scholars know that they are better off starting their careers in major universities where they have normal chances of review for promotion to associate professor with tenure," says Skocpol, a former member of the Faculty Council.

And scholars who do accept non-tenured positions here may do it with a sense that Harvard will serve, if nothing else, as a useful line on their resume when they leave to seek a tenured job elsewhere.

"I've heard the expression by many people that Harvard is a good place to be coming from,"Chilton says. "I know a handful of people who have had may exact position in this exact wing [of the Anthropology Department] and they are now in good positions."

For now, Chilton says, she plans to spend the years before her promotion review, and, hopefully, tenure review, on her research. And she's putting down roots: in addition to applying for a Bunting Fellowship to write a book and continue her research, Chilton has just accepted her first graduate student.

"It's a little scary for me," the professor says. "I hope I'm going to be here to see her through."

A New Policy?

What could Harvard do to give Chilton and her new graduate student more peace of mind? Some Faculty members say the tenure system could use an overhaul.

Skocpol notes that the University of Chicago, where she taught for five years, promotes assistant professors to associate professors with tenure, leading to "a more collegial atmosphere."

But Skocpol, who sued Harvard for her own tenure position on the basis of gender discrimination and won, is skeptical that Harvard will ever change its policies-or that the University wants to change them.

"I might have ideas if I thought change were possible," she says. "I do not think those who run Harvard will allow change-or even the discussion of change."