The Final Hurdle

Though most Harvard students have never heard of the Perkins Room, the discussions held there come to define their Harvard experiences.

In the room on the second floor of Mass. Hall, which is furnished only with one long table, presidents, deans, and faculty gather to decide the tenure fates of junior professors.

These ad hoc committee meetings—the final stage of a lengthy tenure process—sometimes devolve to “people yelling at each other,” one professor said. But one man ultimately holds veto power over all decisions: University President Lawrence H. Summers.

Professors say Summers’ vocal involvement ensures the rigor of the tenure process overall and sets him apart from both his predecessors and his peers at other schools.

“In some ways, it’s the most important thing a Harvard president does,” says Summers, who adds that he turns down roughly one in 10 tenure cases that reach his office.

GATHERING SUPPORT

Like a college applicant, each associate faculty member entering the tenure review process in the penultimate year of his appointment must condense the record of his achievements in scholarship, teaching, and citizenship for a dossier.

Unlike a college application, though, the manila folder containing a tenure candidate’s dossier may be up to 10 inches thick. According to the Appointment Handbook for the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, it may enclose such documents as the department chair’s case statement, the candidate’s curriculum vitae and research statement, teaching evaluations, and over a dozen three-to-four page letters.

Every senior faculty member in the candidate’s department writes a confidential letter which is considered in conjunction with reviews from outside scholars.

Mailed back from across the nation and sometimes across the globe, the external letters respond to the 20 or so requests from departments for evaluations of tenure candidates compared to five or six other scholars in a cohort spanning 10 to 15 years.

The internal and external reviews inform each other.

“They look at nominally the same thing, but the outside letters have less insight into teaching, advising, and internal service,” says Chemistry and Chemical Biology Department Chair Cynthia Friend, who chaired a 2003 committee that reviewed faculty appointment processes.

INSIDE THE BOARDROOM

Each Wednesday, Dean of the Faculty William C. Kirby sits down with the academic deans to review dossiers.

The meeting is a “filter” for tenure cases, says Dean for the Physical Sciences and the Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences Venkatesh “Venky” Narayanamurti. The group either forwards a case to Summers or asks the department to bolster it before it is considered at the next level.

When a case arrives on Summers’ desk, an ad hoc committee convenes to consider the tenure recommendation.

From 8:30 a.m. to about noon, the ad hoc committee meets in the Perkins Room, first listening to testimony from department chairs and senior faculty members, and then continuing in a private session during which Summers asks committee members their opinions about the candidate and his field.

“When you’re waiting to come in to testify, it’s not soundproof very well, so you’re listening to people yelling at each other,” says Lisa L. Martin, who is Dillon professor of international affairs and senior adviser to the dean on faculty diversity. “You’re cooling your heels while they’re having a very lively discussion.”

Summers presides over ad hoc committees for the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the Kennedy School of Government, the Law School, and the Business School. University Provost Steven E. Hyman runs the ad hoc meetings in the remaining schools.

In addition to Summers, Kirby, the divisional dean who oversees the candidate’s department, and two or three faculty from related departments and other universities sit on each ad hoc committee.

Those who have gathered in the Perkins Room for ad hoc committee meetings say that the president’s personality changes the atmosphere of the meeting—and that Summers is serious and thorough, especially when compared to his predecessors.

“It’s not pro forma. Different presidents have had different approaches to the ad hoc—I remember one president who never asked one question on a committee,” says Philip A. Kuhn ’54, who is Higginson professor of history and of East Asian languages and civilizations (EALC) and former EALC chair. “Summers is a particularly tough ad hoc judge, he really prepares, asks tough questions....He likes to be argued with in the ad hoc committee.”

“Legitimately, there is somewhat of an adversary sense, you’re expected to go in and defend your department’s position and expect to be challenged,” says History Department Chair Andrew D. Gordon ’74, adding that when you ask 20 people for letters, there will be less-than-glowing responses that need to be explained. “The president is expected to be skeptical to some extent.”

While “really sterling” candidates make the ad hoc a pleasant experience, “when it’s a tough case, which most cases are, it can be grilling, it can be like sitting on oral examination for a PhD candidate—very invigorating,” says Government Department Chair Nancy L. Rosenblum ’69. “You lose credibility in a way if you’re not careful about how good a case you make—that’s an important variable that people miss.”

QUALITY CONTROL

Economics Department Chair Alberto F. Alesina says Summers’ critical approach serves as an important check on the quality of tenure appointments.

“We have been even more careful in what we brought up,” Alesina says. “For other departments it might have been a little bit of a shock, they might have been used to a less proactive president.”

Economics is Summers’ intellectual forte, and it is no surprise that he would grill the department on candidates’ research and potential contributions, say Alesina and Martin.

But Summers also has to make decisions about cases in other fields.

“To what degree can a president make a decision about people in areas about which he really knows nothing?” asks Sanskrit and Indian Studies ChairLeonard W.J. van der Kuijp.

“A humbling moment should take place, so then I believe the president will have closely to read what the ad hoc committee has to say and also look very closely at the files of the person who’s being brought up for tenure: It requires a lot of commitment. You’re dealing with people’s futures,” he says.

Summers says the amount of time required for each tenure case varies.

“Some cases are very clear, other cases one can spend very large amounts of time making phone calls and consulting with people to make sure you make the right decision, to make sure you make as good a decision as you can,” he says.

Gordon says it’s important that there is someone beyond the level of the department who presides over the tenure decision, whether it is the provost or the president.

“Departments can become clubby, they get to know somebody really well, like them and conceivably want to appoint them because they’re a good friend and citizen. Or the reverse can happen where that department is acting prejudicially,” he said. “The idea that there is some external and higher-level review that’s serious and not nominal is good.”

‘THE MOST IMPORTANT THING’

Summers says he believes in getting acquainted with the candidates through a multi-dimensional discussion rather than a passive interaction with their dossiers.

“Harvard’s system of ad hoc reviews has structurally put the president in a more important, in a more central role than in other universities,” he says. “I think that’s been a very, very important contributor to Harvard’s strength, because I don’t think there’s any substitute for conversation and questioning advocates of appointments rather than simply reading files. And so I hope very much that system will be preserved.”

Presidents of other leading institutions are not as involved in the tenure process as Summers.

At the University of Chicago, the provost decides the outcome of a tenure case after reading the documents and the deans’ recommendation, says Provost Richard P. Saller. Chicago’s president signs off on tenure appointments but does not participate in discussion about the files.

“I don’t think it makes any difference whether it’s under the president or the provost,” Saller says. “The issue is how the scrutiny is done at the top level.”

Chicago’s tenure system does not include review by an ad hoc committee.

“If we believed that it dramatically enhanced the quality of the appointments, we would probably adopt such a process, but I don’t know that it obviously does,” Saller says.

Although Columbia University does put tenure cases through an ad hoc scrutiny, Provost Alan Brinkley agrees that the existence of an ad hoc committee does not seem to significantly affect the quality of the tenure process.

Brinkley says rigorous tenure review at the departmental level is the most important part of the tenure process, but central administration processes such as ad hoc committees force the departments to take their cases seriously in anticipation of higher-level review.

“They’re trying to make sure the departments are living up to the requirements of the university...there has to be a check to make sure departments don’t fail to do that,” Brinkley says.

Like Saller, Brinkley is more involved in the tenure process than Columbia’s president, who receives Brinkley’s recommendations but does not participate in ad hoc committee meetings.

Martin, the senior adviser to the dean, points out the ad hoc nature of the committee as a controversial aspect of Harvard’s appointment process when compared to standing committees at other institutions.

At Stanford University, tenure cases advance from the provost to a university-wide advisory committee called the University Advisory Board, says Associate Provost for Faculty Affairs Megan W. Pierson. The president approves a positive recommendation from the board but will read the case to make a final decision if the recommendation is negative.

‘A BIG COMMITMENT’

At Harvard, bringing together several top administrators and internal and external professors for the ad hoc meeting has to be done relatively quickly—four to six weeks from when the case is ready.

“It’s like putting together a really complicated jigsaw puzzle,” Martin says.

But professors acknowledge that decision-making takes time.

“It is a very long drawn-out process, it means that Harvard can never act quickly, and I’m sure there are opportunity costs, but mostly they’re outweighed by good decisions on the other side. I came from a university where tenure was much easier, where there weren’t checks like at Harvard, and I don’t think that university did as well in building faculty,” says Rosenblum, who taught at Brown from 1980 to 2001.

While Gordon acknowledges that “Harvard is not quite as able to be as quick as other schools that have a slightly more streamlined and slightly less careful process,” he says it has sped up in the past decade and can be accelerated further for competitive cases.

But “tenure is a big commitment,” says Kuhn, who estimates that each tenure appointment costs $4 million, taking into account a tenured professor’s salary, benefits, and research expenses. “Once a person has tenure, you can’t get rid of it.”

—Nicholas M. Ciarelli, Javier C. Hernandez, and Evan H. Jacobs contributed to the reporting of this story.

—Staff writer Lulu Zhou can be reached at luluzhou@fas.harvard.edu.