Outstripping Goals

Dean of the Faculty William C. Kirby said it was “virtually certain” that Harvard will have surpassed his predecessor’s goal of growing the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) by 10 percent in 10 years—a resolution made in 2000—when the FAS closes the current academic year on June 30 with 700 members.

Former Dean of the Faculty Jeremy R. Knowles announced in 2000 that he planned to expand the Faculty’s ranks to 700 professors by 2010.

But Kirby says the FAS will reach the 750 mark by 2010 and will not stop there; he says he eventually wants to see 800 chairs set in University Hall each time the full Faculty gathers for its monthly meetings.

The FAS weighed in at 672 professors in January, up from 656 faculty members in the previous year and 636 in 2003.

“What Dean Knowles had suggested is that when we were at a Faculty of 635, we would aim to add 60 professors, to wind up with about 700,” Kirby told The Crimson in December. “We are moving more quickly toward this goal than he had anticipated.”

Growing FAS to this size will rejuvenate an aging faculty, allow the increasing student-faculty interaction recommended by the ongoing Harvard College Curricular Review, and improve the school’s collective research output by building a faculty with a wider range of research interests, Kirby wrote in his third annual letter to FAS in February.

Kirby has identified three key subsections of the faculty on which he plans to focus hiring efforts.

He has said that hiring women is an important element of FAS growth and that the process will be facilitated by two new positions to be created next year: a senior vice-provost for diversity and faculty development and a liaison to that provost from within FAS. (Please see “Shopping for Diversity,” page C1.)

To increase the size of the Faculty, Kirby’s initiatives have also included a focus on promoting younger professors from within and on hiring interdisciplinary scholars.

MOVING ON UP

In his annual letter, Kirby announced that departments should consider assistant professorships “tenure-track” positions, which should encourage the recruitment of junior faculty members and their eventual promotion to senior positions.

In previous years most hires have been senior faculty members and now 37 percent of senior faculty members are 60 years old or older, according to Kirby’s letter.

“At least two-thirds of our growth should occur in the non-tenured ranks over the coming decade. Therefore, to a much greater degree than in the past, we will be appointing new senior faculty from within,” Kirby wrote.

“The assistant professor of today will be the full professor of tomorrow. We will, of course, maintain very high standards for promotion. But it is a common misperception that achieving tenure at Harvard is inconceivably difficult, if not impossible,” he continued.

Dean for the Social Sciences David Cutler echoed Kirby’s interest in hiring professors earlier in their careers, with the goal of later promotion.

“We’re paying particular attention to...people who are at a less advanced career stage than we would typically look at,” Cutler said.

Kirby began initiatives to facilitate the promotion of junior faculty members in the fall of 2003, when he reformed the process of granting tenure.

Previously, departments conducting searches sent “blind letters” to experts in the field at other schools, asking them to rank prospective hires from both within and without Harvard—but giving them no information about the candidates’ qualifications or how seriously the departments were considering them.

Under the revised system, each departmental letter will state its own ranking of the candidates in question, specify those who are already Harvard junior faculty, and include samples of their work.

In addition, all junior professors will receive written evaluations at the beginning of their third year at Harvard, even before a department considers them for tenure.

These assessments will give assistant and associate professors an indication of their chances of receiving tenure at a major research university.

“I think it is critical to the future of our Faculty, and essential in the lives of our assistant and associate professors, that we aim to provide them at each important milestone, particularly at the point of consideration for promotion to associate professor, with a clear assessment of their work to date and their future prospects, so that they can have confidence in our processes,” Kirby told The Crimson in 2003.

Reflecting this interest in growing the faculty by hiring professors at the assistant and associate levels and promoting them, three of the senior professors who started their appointments in the fall were promoted from within the junior faculty ranks, joining five who were promoted from within the previous year.

“A greater percentage of searches will be at the assistant and associate professor level, and we will encourage departments to provide opportunities for mentoring and career development and other forms of support so that our new colleagues may become strong candidates for tenure,” Kirby told The Crimson last year

DIVISIONAL DECISIONS

Kirby has also placed an increasing emphasis on broadening professors’ research opportunities by hiring more faculty members whose work spans disciplines.

“This remains an area of significant interest, not for its own sake but because of our conviction that some of the most interesting scholarship and exciting learning is taking place at the increasingly porous boundaries between traditional disciplines,” Kirby wrote in an e-mail.

This year, Kirby instituted a system of “divisional appointments” to identify possible hires who do interdisciplinary work and whose names might not surface in regular departmental searches.

“It’s a question of how you expand the names of who we consider for appointments,” Kirby said.

Generally, a professor is appointed to a particular department after the department convenes an ad hoc committee to consider the candidate.

But divisional appointments will be made by interdisciplinary committees. Each committee will be chaired by one of the four divisional deans who oversee the humanities, social sciences, physical sciences, and life sciences.

Each professor who is selected by one of these committees will still be affiliated with a specific department.

“I think the proper phrase to use in this is ‘divisional searches,’” Kirby said.

But several professors have criticized Kirby’s divisional appointments system, saying that it transfers power to four administrators that should belong to the departments, and that it might also decrease attention to women in the hiring process.

Kirby said that professors were misunderstanding the system, which is meant to identify talent that might not otherwise arise in departmental searches.

Other professors have criticized the system of divisional appointments because they say it will complicate the process of appointing professors who do interdisciplinary work across divisions.

“We worry about that. It imposes somewhat arbitrary distinctions,” said Sociology Department Chair Mary C. Waters.

Waters added that interdisciplinary work should grow organically out of professors’ research.

“In some ways, the divisional dean structure is the opposite, as it is a top-down approach,” Waters said.

But Cutler said that the divisional deans communicate regularly to make sure that candidates whose research interests cross divisions are not overlooked.

—Staff writer Sara E. Polsky can be reached at polsky@fas.harvard.edu.