Harvard Name Isn't Always Enough

When it comes to tenure, Harvard is picky--it only takes the best. But according to recently released numbers, the best may be even pickier--they don't always take Harvard.

Since 1991, 60 of the 200 professors who have been offered tenure at Harvard have said "no, thank you."

When Harvard chooses to grant a tenure offer to a junior Faculty member in one of its departments, they almost always say yes.

But according to Dean of the Faculty Jeremy R. Knowles, recruiting senior faculty from other institutions can be a much more difficult proposition.

Many professors turn down tenure because they have ties to family and jobs outside of Cambridge. Though the University says it tries to accommodate professors whenever possible, they sometimes cannot.

The Art of Persuasion

Certain departments have been markedly more successful than others in getting professors to accept tenure.

The economics department, for instance, has tenured five senior professors in the past two years, some of whom were in high demand from prestigious schools across the country. The department is also working towards its goal of hiring five new associate professors.

In 1998, the department found itself the target of poaching efforts by Columbia University. Nevertheless, the department managed to convince Waggoner Professor of Economics Robert J. Barro to stay at Harvard, even after Barro was reportedly offered a pay package totaling nearly $300,000 from Columbia.

As universities vie to attract top-notch scholars, professors are starting to ask universities to provide packages that can make picking up and moving worthwhile--jobs for a spouse, housing, even help finding schooling for their children.

Knowles says it's reasonable for the university to help professors in this way.

"If someone is to flourish here, we must be sensitive to their needs," Knowles says. "Happy people do good work, and that is especially true for a people-intensive activity like education."

Knowles says that some professors have important obligations to their families and do not want to move.

"The kind of people we invite from outside are likely to be distinguished and well recognized, particularly by their home institutions," Knowles says. "Aiming high, will therefore always be harder. More than half of the turndowns are because of family reasons, some of the other reasons are cultural."

Ties to home institutions can be even stronger for senior professors when they've been showered with honors--made the head of a local center or institute or the editor of an important academic journal.

Chair of the government department Roderick MacFarquhar says this was exactly the case for one professor who recently turned down a tenure offer.

Another desired professor was given an extra semester of paid leave in exchange for his continued employment. He turned Harvard down.

Even if Harvard is not prepared to counter such offers, such quandaries are not uncommon.

"Universities are no different in this sense from the commercial world-- where inviting a CEO from another company...is commonplace--or in any other competitive marketplace," Knowles says.

Star Salaries

While the University is willing help put packages together that might convince professors with families to come to Cambridge, officials have refused for years to get into bidding wars for professors.

On average, Harvard's salaries for senior Faculty members are among the top in the country. But the administration traditionally declines to offer big name professors higher salaries than their already-tenured Harvard colleagues.

Dean of the College Harry R. Lewis '68 says that because Harvard does not offer particularly high salaries to 'stars' in certain fields, they may lose some professors.

"Recruiting a senior person from another institution is difficult," he says. "But it's difficult everywhere. It takes longer here, and part of that is because Harvard is less willing to go to a kind of star system...we have very high quality across disciplines."

Saying No

MacFarquhar says his department has the usual difficulties convincing senior professors to move to Cambridge.

But MacFarquhar maintains he does not think universities should use large pay packages to lure professors they want to join the Faculty.

"There are ways to make coming to Harvard very attractive, but there are always some obstacles," he says.

MacFarquhar says professors leave their jobs--and choose new ones--for a variety of reasons. For instance, he says that professors may choose to leave Harvard because they want to do research or write, rather than teach.

"The Harvard faculty are quite hard worked in comparison with faculty at other comparable institutions," he says.

MacFarquhar says he knows of at least one professor who left Harvard in order to have more time for research.

Morris P. Fiorina, a former professor of government, left Harvard for Stanford, telling colleagues he "recommends Stanford for faculty and Harvard for undergraduates, because a lot of faculty there only have to teach half the time," MacFarquhar says.

Another one of MacFarquhar's colleagues who has visited Stanford was amazed at the number of people in the political science department who taught part time and spent the rest of the time doing research.

But the government department, he says, has their choice of the "most brilliant recruits out there in the world."

A Complicated Process

The Harvard system for granting tenure is different than that of other universities because Harvard has no tracking system.

Many universities hire professors primarily at the junior level and tenure from within. Professors usually receive tenure if they have met a certain set of requirements. At Harvard, an intensive search process helps departments extend offers only to the leading scholars their field--which often means passing over hard workers from within departments in favor of stars from the outside.

For internal promotions, a department considers tenure candidates and after a preliminary review, the department head writes a recommendation to the Dean of the Faculty.

In making tenure offers, Harvard looks at these departmental nominations along with nominations of professors from other universities, those who apply, and junior faculty.

The ad hoc committee then meets and reviews each case, and the president of the University ultimately decides whether or not to grant tenure.

If after all this work, a professor chooses to turn the University down, departments must go back to square one.

It can be a long and tiring process. But Knowles says he is not disturbed by the number of professors who turn down tenure.

"You might like to look at it the other way," Knowles says. "That is, about 70 percent of our offers succeed...Actually our overall success rate is a bit higher than it was in the eighties."