Summer Tenures Expand Faculty

From an engineer of robotic replacements for human limbs to an authority on how men and women work together, this semester's Faculty has grown in number and knowledge.

With the extension of tenure to five new professors in three departments this summer, the Faculty added to its expertise art and microelectronics that may change the way the future works.

The Classics department added two female professors. Cathy Coleman, now teaching in Dublin, Ireland, and Gloria Pinney, of the University of Chicago, both accepted tenure in July.

Pinney, who accepted a joint tenure with the Department of History of Art and Architecture, said she would be offering courses on Greek and Roman art and architecture.

Both she and Coleman will stay at their current institutions through the current school year and plan to join the Faculty next fall.

"Chicago is a very hospitable place, and it's not fair to say that I could do something at Harvard that I could not do at Chicago," Pinney said. "But the resources at Harvard are enormously superior."

Pinney said she looked forward to using the "wonderful" collections in Harvard museums as teaching tools, but said she would try to keep the correct mind set about being a member of the Faculty.

"There is such an enormous amount of prestige attached, but I'd like to take the right attitude," she said. "You don't want to take it that you've been crowned."

The Sociology department also gained a female Faculty member by adding Barbara Reskin from Ohio State University (OSU) for this fall.

Reskin's research has centered on gender inequality, especially in the workplace. She said that accepting tenure meant also accepting new problems in her personal life.

"My long-term partner teaches at OSU. We've commuted before and resolved never to do it again," Reskin said in an e-mail. "So I felt like a bit of a fink, especially when we had attractive opportunities available at another good university."

Reskin said that while she was not initially attracted to Harvard, she was won over by Harvard's students during campus recruiting visits.

"I was both pleased and stressed [to accept tenure]," she said. "Pleased not to have been rejected and at having the chance to come here, but stressed that it meant making a difficult decision between some very attractive alternatives (none of which was the OSU Sociology department)."

In the Division of Engineering and Applied Science (DEAS), two junior Faculty were also elevated to tenure over the summer.

Robert D. Howe--whose work in bioengineering includes robotic prosthetics--and Woodward Yang, an electrical engineer specializing in micro-electronics, had both spent seven years in the DEAS before receiving tenure.

Yang, who said he was currently offering an undergraduate course in the Computer Science department which covered the basics of very small electrical circuits, said his research parallels his teaching.

"The number of things that you can do with this incredible technology for building tiny microelectronic processors is virtually limitless," he said, noting that Harvard was making a large commitment to electrical engineering in general.

Yang said that, as a former Harvard junior Faculty member, his life had not been greatly affected by tenure.

"The only material change since tenure has been that I find myself spending a lot more time serving on committees," he said.