Summers Hints at Huge Faculty Increase

When Harvard's presidential search committee asked its final choice candidate, president-elect Lawrence H. Summers, how he would revitalize the University's undergraduate education, he responded with an ambitious agenda for Harvard's faculty.

Summers has proposed hiring 200 new professors as well as promoting significantly more junior professors to tenured positions, according to The Boston Globe. If implemented, these changes would represent strong shifts in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) from its current student to faculty ratio and traditionally stern reluctance to tenure from within.

But the goal of increasing the size of the faculty is far from revolutionary--it has been one of Dean of the Faculty Jeremy R. Knowles' top priorities for years. And the mention of total faculty size in Knowles' annual letter--a roughly flat line over the last 30 years--may indicate that Summers' sweeping vision for a larger, younger faculty could be a long time coming.

Professors say that Summers' commitment to the project carries some weight in and of itself, and the University presidency has certain roles in the recruitment and appointment process that the former professor could expedite. But the drawn-out and labor-intensive nature of the appointment process may make Summers' task difficult.

A Decentralized Process

The chain of command in FAS has frequently been described as "every top on its own bottom"--meaning that departments have a great deal of autonomy even when FAS-wide initiatives are attempted.

The search process is no exception to this rule. According to Dean of Undergraduate Education Susan G. Pedersen '82, FAS searches are authorized by Knowles but conducted by the individual departments who select the candidates.

But this process requires large amounts of time and effort on the part of already-understaffed departments, exacerbating the dearth of resources available for teaching and research.

In turn, small departments often do not have the manpower to expend the time needed to make enough appointments to actually increase the size of the department.

"More faculty would make [the search process] less labor-intensive," says one University Hall official.

The University president does not become a formal part of the process until much later, presiding over ad-hoc committee meetings and making the final decision on the candidate.

FAS officials say that only individual departments are qualified to conduct searches for positions within them.

"It's very difficult to take the process out of the departments," says one dean.

Options from Above

The president of the University is thus even more removed from the machinery of the search process than the dean of the Faculty, and though Rudenstine has supported Knowles' efforts, Rudenstine's actual involvement in the process has been minimal.

And though faculty and administrators stress that increasing the size of the faculty is primarily Knowles' domain, they say Summers can play a role in effecting the broad gains he proposed to the presidential search committee, and that he may have some advantages his predecessor lacked.

Though his actual influence may be minimal, some professors have suggested that by simply increasing the frequency of ad-hoc meetings, Summers would send a symbolic message that new appointments are high on the presidential priority list.

But the new president's pronouncements would probably have a greater effect on the second component of the plan he proposed to the search committee: increasing odds for internal promotion.

University Hall officials say that in addition to ensuring that Harvard attracts and retains top talent, tenure offers to current junior faculty typically have a much higher rate of success than those to external candidates.

"If we promoted more from within, the yields would be much better," says one dean. "The context is changing for juniors. We're promoting more and the environment is better. Recruiting internal and external candidates is very different. [Internal ones] are already settled."

And though tenuring internal candidates does not increase the size of the faculty, it does shift the burden of the search process onto junior appointments, which are typically easier to make.

On this front, Summers could put public pressure on FAS to grant tenure to its premier junior faculty, even if he himself is not responsible for extending the offers.

"He could...lead on this issue," Pedersen wrote in an e-mail, "by urging all of us to try to move more quickly and to seek to make appointments (when possible) through internal promotion."

Former Dean of the Faculty and Geyser University Professor Emeritus Henry Rosovsky also points out that Summers could use his national repute and the prestige of his post to lure wavering candidates to the University.

"The president can be very helpful in recruiting," Rosovsky says. "And if he and the dean see the problem in the same way, that's helpful."

According to Ropes Professor of Economics Richard E. Caves, Summers could do the most to achieve his and Knowles' goal by encouraging colleagues to fundamentally question what they are looking for with candidates and whether they are rejecting qualified applicants because searches are too narrowly defined.

"You could change the standards you apply without changing the procedure. You could change the sort of scholarship that you value. You can argue that the person you want meets the standard, and that's where the debate takes place," Caves says.

But even if what Summers can contribute explicitly through action or message may be limited, some professors say his background as an economics professor may give him an advantage in approaching the problem.

Rosovsky said Summers' economic intuition would give him an effective problem-solving approach, and that the problem of increasing the size of the faculty was not an exception.

"Economists understand a variety of things," he says. "They understand marginal analysis and indirect effects. Economists are levelheaded individuals and adept at social analysis."

--Staff writer Daniel K. Rosenheck can be reached at rosenhec@fas.harvard.edu.