Faculty Shortage Hurts Classes, Students

Since it jumped from 15 students to 35 two years ago, Computer Science head tutor Steven J. Gortler's graphics seminar "just isn't the same."

As the number of CS concentrators nearly doubled between 1994 and the present, Gortler says his Computer Science 276r: "Computer Graphics, Special Topics," has become a "seminar" in name only.

"When you get to 35 people, it's hard to figure out how to maintain that interaction [in a small seminar]," Gortler said. "Students are missing out...they're thinking less on their feet."

The solution to Gortler's dilemma would seem to be getting another faculty member to teach a second seminar, but in a department with only 12 full-time professors, help is nowhere to be found.

Two years after Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) Jeremy R. Knowles announced that increasing the size of the faculty was his top priority, the number of professors in FAS remains at about 650--as it has for the past 30 years--despite a ten percent increase in undergraduate enrollment over that period.

Even when "non-ladder" faculty (lecturers) are included in the calculation, Harvard's student to faculty ratio of eight to one lags behind those of Yale (7:1) and Princeton (6:1).

Faculty and administrators say the demands of the University's ambitious Core and Freshman Seminar programs and pressures created by professors with extracurricular responsibilities has left many departments struggling to stay afloat.

The groundwork is being laid for the addition of six new positions to FAS in each of the next ten years, as Knowles promised in his annual letter to the faculty.

But a tough recruiting environment, space constraints and the perception that Harvard does not tenure its own junior faculty are all major obstacles to growth that students and faculty alike say is necessary to the future of undergraduate education.

Spread Too Thin

Dean of Undergraduate Education Susan G. Pedersen '82 says the need for more faculty is widely recognized among deans and professors.

"Many colleagues seem to be quite overworked--we're simply spread too thin," she said.

Departments like psychology that have experienced a recent surge in concentrators have been most affected by understaffing.

According to Psychology Department Chair Daniel L. Schacter, the department has had to recruit additional lecturers thesis advisors from the Medical School in order to meet undergraduate demand.

Professor of Psychology Stephen M. Kosslyn painted a picture of a department more likely to be found at a large state school than at a private university.

"The whole system is being stretched," he said. "Students are having trouble getting into concentration requirements because they're full; [they] can't get people to advise their theses."

In the CS department, Gortler said, the annual loss of one or two professors to sabbaticals causes anxiety over offerings.

"Every year there's a minor crisis to cover what we say we're going to cover," he said.

In addition, Pedersen said, Harvard professors have more extracurricular responsibilities than their counterparts at other schools simply because of their standing in the academic community.

"[Harvard faculty] do a lot of outside reviewing and peer reviewing," she said. "Our faculty have to play a leadership role in their fields."

According to English Department Chair Lawrence Buell, these expectations are especially apparent in the humanities.

"My colleagues...feel rather strongly burdened by the combination of needing to stay active and visible in the profession (as the university expects)," he says.

And for junior faculty, these needs are especially pressing since tenure decisions are largely based on being a major figure in the field, Pedersen says.

The Core of the Problem

According to Associate Dean for Faculty Development Laura G. Fisher, the faculty began to feel a crunch with the advent of the Core Curriculum in the late 1970's.

The implementation of the Core Curriculum demanded more from professors--especially senior faculty--but it was not met by an increase in the ranks of FAS.

Without additional faculty to teach the new curriculum, the Core offers less than 70 percent of the 132 courses it is supposed to offer.

"Faculty members are very scrupulous about covering their own areas," said Pedersen, "but we also try to mount a general education curriculum, with the Core and freshman seminars. That's hard to sustain with the size of the faculty we have now."

Fisher said that these requirements were concentrated in certain departments that overlap to a large degree with specific Core areas.

"We have an obligation to give students a broad curriculum of courses in Literature and Arts B that we can't meet because we don't have enough people," said Harvard College Professor Thomas Forrest Kelly, chair of the Music department. "The Core puts a little more burden on us."

A Seller's Market

The FAS administration is well aware of the need for more faculty--Knowles has consistently deemed it a top priority. But one of the largest issues facing FAS has also proved one of the most difficult to address.

Judging by the results of the recently completed $2.65 billion capital campaign, increasing the size of the faculty is a much weaker selling point than construction projects. The only goal the campaign failed to achieve was the addition of 40 new named professorships to FAS--at the hefty sticker price of $2.5 million a pop.

But administrators involved in the recruitment process say that money is a secondary issue, instead pointing to a more competitive environment for top faculty than ever before.

Fisher and Government Department chair Roderick L. MacFarquhar said that the most important reason for this shift is the increased number of two-career families--especially when both husband and wife are academics.

"We're trying to recruit individuals at a time when they are already settled and they have families," Fisher says, "We're really recruiting families. And we're in a very different housing market [than most colleges in the country.]"

Other colleges have attempted to combat professors and their spouses' reluctance to uproot their families by creating jobs for spouses, Fisher said, but Harvard does not have such a policy.

Harvard's competitors also offer perks such as reduced teaching loads and more generous leave policies, incentives that Harvard refuses to offer.

"It can become a bidding war," she said. "As a result of our recruitment, faculty at other institutions have enriched themselves. So we have to be judicious with our resources."

But this leaves Harvard at a disadvantage, forcing candidates to teach twice as many classes as they would at another school--but the University still is unwilling to hire faculty before they have established themselves in academia.

"The question becomes, are you willing to take a risk to appoint someone younger who is a world-class but maybe not world-known scholar?," MacFarquhar says. "I think Harvard tends to be risk-averse because we are claiming to hire the best."

Stuck on the Ladder

When it comes to promoting Harvard's own junior faculty, the University's record is spotty at best. According to Knowles' letter, only 16 percent of tenured professors in the humanities departments came from within the University.

Although there is a consensus that Harvard has improved on this front from its past insistence on sending promising candidates away before rehiring them with tenure, administrators say many candidates fear old habits die-hard.

"Even in departments where there has been successful promotion from within, the perception is that it doesn't happen," Fisher said. "People who choose to go elsewhere have a better sense of their future prospects than they do here."

This perception also reinforces itself by discouraging top junior faculty from staying through the end of Harvard's eight-year junior appointment and undergoing the tenure review process.

"The cases [where candidates don't get tenure] tend to resonate more loudly," said Vincent J. Tompkins, Associate Dean for Academic Affairs. "And a junior faculty member will find that by the fourth or fifth year, they're getting offers elsewhere."

We Need Space

Another major obstacle to hiring more faculty is space constraints, which Knowles deemed the faculty's "largest challenge" in his letter.

This literal squeeze is most apparent in the psychology department in William James Hall, which Kosslyn says is bursting at the seams.

"New positions are targeted for us, and where do we put these people?" Schacter asks. "If you don't have anywhere to put them, you can't initiate the search. We had a net increase of one professor several years ago, but we've made limited use of it because of space constraints."

These needs are even more pressing in the hard sciences, where new professors need lab and research space that Knowles estimates at four to five thousand square feet.

Although the University has taken steps to alleviate this problem--the purchase of 50 acres in Allston, a plan to renovate the North Yard and the eventual takeover of the Inn at Harvard in 2013--FAS is unlikely to see any substantial increase in available space over the next few years.

But faculty and administrators alike stress that decade-long timeframes are the only ones that make sense for a meaningful increase in the size of the faculty, because the search process is so laborious. As Knowles wrote in his letter, "The faculty effort that goes into a search can be high, and this effort is frustrated when the offer is not accepted. Gone are the days when Harvard merely decided, and beckoned."

"We can only [increase faculty size] as quickly as departments make searches, read recommendations, write dossiers, send them to the academic deans, and send it to the president for ad hoc review," Fisher says. "All of this takes time; there's a very high level of scrutiny."

The search process is so labor-intensive that many departments barely have the resources to devote to growing their ranks.

The competitive marketplace has further slowed efforts at growth.

"If you're lucky, you're able to find one right person each year," Gortler said. "In a year, if we can interview ten or 15 people, we might make one or two offers, and those people themselves might have ten or 15 offers."

In addition, most departments conduct multiple searches for senior faculty every year just to break even.

"We hire between 20 and 30 individuals every year, but we lose 20 or 30 to retirement or resignation, so we just run in place," Fisher said.

But despite these obstacles, deans insist that Knowles' efforts are starting to pay off.

"We are starting to see the consequences of a lot of very hard work searching," Pedersen says. "We're not looking for a larger faculty tomorrow, but over the course of ten years we're hoping for a substantial growth."