The Tenure Odyssey

As we grow older, imagination tends to be more and more underrated. Somewhere around seventh grade, people cease telling us to imagine and start telling us to analyze, and most of us do just that. But today, some imagination will be crucial to understand what we are about to explain. So pull out that rusty old dream machine and imagine, if you will, the following scenario.

You are a man or woman in your forties living in one of the nation's urban centers, eager for a long sought-after promotion at a powerful organization where you work. You have spent many years--perhaps even over a decade--undergoing rigorous training for your position. Of course, so have many others, and only the select few will be chosen as one of this organization's next Men in Black. Luckily (you believe), you have an advantage. You know the place. You know the people. They know you. You put in the time and then some. And most of all, you are fairly certain that you are the best of the best. Or at least darn close to it.

Then, after years of training and outstanding performance enough to surpass any Olympic hopeful, the Day of Judgment arrives. The near-divine tribunal convenes, its members undisclosed, to deliberate upon your fate. (Here's where we imagine the doors of the Court of Star Chamber slamming shut.) Later, without any revelation of who these secret judges are, the announcement is made that you have been deemed unworthy. You are relocated to Kansas. Meanwhile, perhaps, another up-and-coming Man in Black has already been chosen for promotion in your place--someone just like you, except he's from Kansas. And now, if you're lucky, you might just get his old job.

Welcome to Harvard's best-ever mystery thriller, "Cambridge Confidential." What you have just witnessed--or, more accurately, not witnessed--is Harvard's tenure process.

Dean of the Faculty Jeremy R. Knowles makes Harvard's hiring policy even more like a search for the Men in Black: "The membership of tenure ad hoc committees and all the proceedings and documentation," he told The Crimson, "are, as they have always been, strictly confidential." Other universities have standing committees that determine tenure offers, but Knowles sure is right about Harvard. To determine the membership of the ad hoc committee that discussed Peter Berkowitz's tenure bid, for example, Weld Professor of Law Charles R. Nesson '60, actually used a prominent private investigator.

Yet despite pretensions to the contrary, Harvard is not the U.S. Government, and this kind of secrecy crosses the line from practical into absurd. It seems clear that junior faculty, like everyone else, are under-informed about the tenure process. While internal hiring has increased in recent years, it varies widely by department and remains across the board much lower than at other universities. Rather than raise up star faculty from within its ranks, Harvard has fallen prey to the trend in academia toward seeking out what some have called "academostars," cutting-edge scholars who are more or less auctioned off to the highest bidding institutions. In the meantime, Harvard's junior faculty positions are so tenuous that graduate students don't even want to choose these scholars as advisers for fear of their imminent departure.

But if Harvard's tenure policy resembles a story made up by someone with a lousy imagination, then perhaps we can hope for the deus ex machina that storytellers with lousy imaginations tend to provide. Maybe the University will notice the discontent brewing within its ranks and actually publish the details of its tenure process, so that junior scholars can at least know what to expect. Or maybe the "policy" of secrecy that Knowles holds so dear will be seen for the antiquated machine that it is, and those who stick around for the tenure process might at least be informed of who their judges are.

Or maybe pigs will fly. It's like they always told us in grade school. With a good imagination, anything can happen.