Faculty Hiring Targets Younger Scholars

With this year’s crop of new professors, Harvard has made small steps toward the goal of granting tenure to younger scholars and those who do interdisciplinary work.

The number of new tenured faculty is likely to be slightly higher this year than last, and three accepted offers were made to current Harvard junior faculty.

Although University President Lawrence H. Summers has urged granting tenure to junior faculty members, fewer internal candidates have accepted offers of tenure this year than last.

However, the tenure of at least 21 new professors this year puts Harvard on track to increase the size of its faculty by 10 percent over 10 years—a goal originally suggested in 2000 by former Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) Jeremy R. Knowles and adopted by Summers and FAS dean William C. Kirby.

When describing their accomplishments this year, both Kirby and Summers put faculty growth at the top of their lists.

They say this year saw a particularly high yield on tenure offers—three-quarters of those offered tenure have accepted. Fourteen offers have yet to be accepted or declined.

The University made 23 and 24 senior appointments during the previous two years. Similarly, 21 scholars have accepted offers of tenure so far this year. There are still 14 offers outstanding, although those may not be resolved by the end of the school year.

Nine of the 21 hires this year were women, a higher number than has been usual in the last several years.

FAS would not provide statistics on the number of senior or junior faculty departing this year. Increasing the Faculty by 10 percent requires hiring 60 new professors in addition to those who are replacing retired or departing faculty members.

Summers cites the hiring of two professors—computational biologist Martin Nowak and psychologist Steven Pinker—as major coups for Harvard.

“We’ve recruited a number of people who are globally recognized stars,” he said.

He touts the English Department’s promotion of Leah Price ’91, a 31-year-old scholar of Victorian literature, as part of his push to tenure young scholars whose best work lies ahead.

The English department will add three senior professors next year—Price, Daniel Albright and James Simpson—a banner year that Department Chair Lawrence Buell attributes to the department’s “unusually flourishing state” right now, although he notes that high acceptance rates also involve a bit of luck.

“We’re always looking for the best people we can get, so to some extent a good year is a luckier than average year in an ongoing quest that’s always high stakes,” Buell said.

Economics department chair Oliver Hart said that while his department has made no senior appointments this year, several candidates are awaiting approval for tenure.

He said the University’s willingness to continue hiring is particularly notable in light of the faltering economy.

“We have to get permission to search in these areas, and the University could say, ‘We’re hurting financially and you can’t do it, you’ll have to postpone it,’” Hart said.

‘A No-Brainer’

Harvard has a reputation for not offering tenure to junior faculty, who are often the younger professors Summers says he wants to keep.

Yet, as two-career couples become the norm, Harvard cannot expect professors to leave homes in other cities for Harvard at late points in their career.

Buell said that under his watch, the professional situation of a scholar’s partner has been a factor in every rejection of a position, junior or senior, in Harvard’s English department.

“It accounts in one way or another for every single case where we’ve offered and it’s been turned down,” he said.

Chair of the Department of Government Roderick MacFarquhar said “tenuring from within is a no-brainer.”

“It is enormously difficult and time consuming and costly to take people away from other universities,” he said.

Buell said Summers has pushed departments “not to hold back from presenting cases of high achievement and great promise because of some imagined iron rule or standard that junior people must meet in the eyes of the administration.”

An assumption that candidates must have published two significant books to be considered at Harvard, Buell said, has been set aside in recent years.

Summers said that as he has considered junior faculty promotion cases, he had paid attention to “teaching and academic citizenship” and that “as we review appointments in departments, we’re always considering the role of how the appointment will affect the junior faculty who are at Harvard and their prospects for promotion.”

Nevertheless, progress has been slow. Price, for example, is only the second junior professor promoted from within the English department in the last 12 years.

And despite Summers’ and Kirby’s emphasis, it is still unclear whether Harvard’s junior faculty this year were more likely to be promoted.

Internal promotions represented three of the 21 tenures, a drop from the total of 12 internal promotions made during the last two years. This year’s numbers are not final, however.

Price cautions that while she had a supportive department, changing an atmosphere that has traditionally discouraged junior professors takes time.

“The administration has made clear that they’re committed to tenure younger people and to tenure more women…but everyone knows that changing the institutional culture will take a lot more than one promotion,” she wrote in an e-mail.

Buell said that while three of four offers of junior faculty positions were accepted in the English department this year, the fourth turned Harvard down for Brown because of better chances for tenure there.

“The reason given for the Brown acceptance is that historically tenure is a lot easier to get at Brown,” he said.

Interdisciplinary Hiring

Summers and Kirby have also said they want to offer tenure to scholars who do interdisciplinary work.

“I think the importance of interdisciplinary work is based on an increasing awareness of how interconnected a whole range of different knowledge has become,” said Homi Bhabha, the chair of the Committee on Degrees in History and Literature.

Pinker and Nowak, the two new recruits Summers often mentions, both do interdisciplinary work.

Pinker’s chair is in the Psychology Department’s Mind, Brain and Behavior program, one of the interdisciplinary concentrations that Summers has praised.

Summers has read Pinker’s work and pushed hard to recruit the cognitive scientist, contacting him at MIT and inviting him to Elmwood, the presidential mansion.

Pinker’s work focuses on language acquisition and conceptual development.

Nowak, currently at Princeton, will hold a rare joint appointment in the mathematics and the organismic and evolutionary biology departments.

His arrival came with a $30 million gift to establish a center in mathematical biology. Summers has often touted his plans to encourage work in the life sciences.

“Summers has heightened awareness for the potential of making interfaculty appointments,” said FAS Associate Dean for Academic Affairs Vince Tompkins.

Summers has the final say on appointments within FAS, and professors say that he has already taken a more vocal role his predecessor, Neil L. Rudenstine.

Some professors say his style during ad hoc committee meetings—which advise him on whether to grant tenure to any candidate—is more engaged and more assertive.

“I have heard from others that President Summers is much more aggressive than Rudenstine, that he is one of the most aggressive questioners in the meeting,” said Lee Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology Tom Maniatis.

Saltonstall Professor of History Charles S. Maier ’60 said Summers “has a slightly different mode” and “is very probing.”

“He likes intellectual games. He likes to pose puzzles,” Maier said of Summers’ questions during tenure meetings.

According to Loeb Professor of Social Sciences David Cutler, one of three FAS academic deans, “Summers is quite actively involved in dictating the direction in a field.”

Although the hiring of Pinker and Nowak contributes to Summers’ focus on interdisciplinary work, many of the prominent senior faculty members who left Harvard last year also held joint appointments.

Former Fletcher University Professor Cornel R. West ’74 taught at the Divinity School and FAS, while K. Anthony Appiah held appointments to both the Afro-American studies and philosophy departments. Anne-Marie Slaughter was a professor both at Harvard Law School and in the FAS government department. All three departed for Princeton.

Gender studies scholar Carol Gilligan had appointments in FAS and the Graduate School of Education before leaving for NYU last year.

Last year, Kirby called the departures of so many prominent Harvard professors “disappointing.”

—Jessica E. Vascellaro contributed to the reporting of this story.

—Staff writer Elisabeth S. Theodore can be reached at theodore@fas.harvard.edu.