Young Tenured Profs Shine in Research and Classroom

On the day the ad hoc committee was set to decide her tenure case, Elena M. Kramer was relaxed.

The plant biology professor was attuned to the reality of Harvard tenure decisions—that prospective senior faculty do not find out the results of the committee meetings until days after the decisions are made.

So, when her committee chair David Haig came by while she was eating lunch and told her, “Thumbs up,” it did not initially register.

“I thought he just meant that everything was over, that the meeting went well. I didn’t think he meant ‘you have tenure,’” Kramer said. “I didn’t quite believe it. We weren’t prepared to celebrate that day, so we had to run out and have a little celebration.”

An empty bottle of Veuve Cliquot champagne from the Office of the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) nestled in Kramer’s office among flowery artwork and copies of Plant Cell magazine is the only remaining evidence of her step from one of the least secure occupations in academia to one of the most.

“I don’t drink alcohol, so I basically gave it to everyone else,” she said.

Kramer is one of a new generation of young stars given a permanent position on the Faculty this year.

Their promotions point to an increase in hiring from within. Over the course of several decades, FAS has moved from almost exclusively promoting from outside in the 1970s and 1980s to a system that appears more open to internal candidates.

Since 2005, junior-level faculty positions have often been advertised as “tenure-track” and departments have put more emphasis on hiring assistant professors who have a good chance at achieving tenure.

The elevations also suggest a greater focus on the importance of pedagogy. A report on teaching and learning released in January 2007 recommended that teaching play a bigger role in tenure decisions, and FAS Dean Michael D. Smith said in a recent interview that this shift is taking place.

Smith said that the Committee on Appointments and Promotions has “put more emphasis on the teaching aspects of a person’s record” and that chairs presenting tenure cases are now expected to include a comprehensive write-up on these factors.

Four young professors—Kramer, Steven R. Levitsky from government, Mark Schiefsky from classics, and Pol Antràs from economics, who all received tenure before their 40th birthday—fit these trends. And while they represent a small sampling of the faculty, their hirings may serve as models for future junior faculty trying to clear the tenure hurdle.

LEVITSKY: ‘A PRETTY MEDIUM-SIZED BRAIN’

Government professor Steven R. Levitsky never thought he had a shot at a senior professorship.

Basing his assessment on the fact that only about one of every 10 junior faculty in the government department achieve tenure, as well as on his personal experience that “every single junior faculty that was here when I arrived departed,” Levitsky reasoned, using his “pretty medium-sized brain,” that his time at Harvard was running out.

After nearly eight years of teaching, Levitsky was preparing to clean up the cluttered piles of papers strewn about his desk and shelves.

He had “a lot of sleepless nights last fall” worrying about having to start over at a new institution at age 39 with a three-year-old daughter. He told his students in an early lecture in Government 20: “Introduction to Comparative Politics” that he would never be back.

But Harvard granted him a permanent place in the Faculty in December, setting off a flood of celebratory e-mails on House lists and prompting his Teaching Fellows in Government 20 to throw a champagne-soaked party with posters celebrating “Comandante Levitsky.”

“It was probably the most meaningful celebration I had,” he said. “It really is the opinion of the students that matters a lot to me.”

Levitsky’s teaching record is firmly established, as his Q ratings have never dipped below 4.7 out of 5, and his classes’ enrollments have ballooned since he took them over.

In 2004, he received the Roslyn Abramson Award for Teaching.

Levitsky thinks his pedagogical record may have helped “at the margins” with his tenure case, but avowed that his opinions were only speculation.

“The old myth among junior faculty is that if you get a teaching award, that’s the kiss of death for tenure. I don’t think that’s true,” he said. “My case was coming up at a time when Harvard was very publicly reevaluating its teaching and making a commitment to improving its undergraduate teaching, and my teaching record sort of helped with it.”

He also pointed out that his research, specifically his upcoming book project, must have been “well-received or at least taken seriously” by outside scholars for him to receive tenure.

The book, which Levitsky is coauthoring with Lucan A. Way from the University of Toronto, discusses the growth of “competitive authoritarian” regimes, in which elections are held but one party holds a large advantage.

Within these regimes, the book contends, long-term ties with Western nations through trade, investment, immigration, and communication have a democratizing effect.

While Levitsky said he may eventually move back to Peru, his wife’s birthplace, he added that he has no immediate plans to leave.

“The knowledge of where you’re going to be means a lot,” he said of tenure. “It’s nice to have a job.”

KRAMER: A NEW MODEL

As someone who is not a gardener and who says her dog is “a major focus of activity,” Kramer’s development into one of the foremost experts on plant biology was unexpected.

She started off as an undergraduate “very into animal development” at Brandeis University, and worked in animal and bacterial labs while she earned her Ph.D. at Yale, but decided those fields were not for her.

A speech given by one of the most prominent researchers in the field pushed her toward the field that would become her home.

Today, she researches plant developmental evolution, or EvoDevo (pronounced “eevo-deevo”)—“a terrible, kitschy name,” she said—studying genetic diversity in flowers.

Her recent work culminated with the implementation of the perennial Aquilegia (or columbine) flower as a new “lab rat” for genetic experiments.

This new genus will provide better opportunities for research on plant morphology than the standard “model system” flower, the Arabidopsis, which Kramer calls “very boring” in this regard.

Kramer teaches Organismic and Evolutionary Biology 52: “Biology of Plants” with Noel Michele Holbrook and Jacques Dumais, where the students often participate in field trips and “eat in every lecture,” she said. She also leads an undergraduate class on plant differentiation and two graduate courses.

With respect to her tenure case, Kramer credited her department for putting “considerable emphasis on teaching,” in addition to pushing her research record.

“I think that in my case that the turn at the University level toward valuing pedagogical contributions helped,” she said. “But, if your department doesn’t value that [teaching], it might not get showcased at the administrative level that would let them pull you up on that basis.”

Kramer has never received lower than 4.6 in Q ratings since fall 2003.

Now comfortably rooted in the Faculty, Kramer said she could see herself at Harvard for a long time and will start utilizing her new model flower in her research.

“Since I spent the last seven years developing this system, now that we have it, there are a lot of things I want to do,” she said.

SCHIEFSKY: PUSHING THE EDGES

Mark Schiefsky is trying to achieve something that may seem paradoxical: to bring novel ideas to the classics.

His specialty is ancient science, where he studies medicine and mechanics—areas that tend to escape the purview of classics professors.

“There hasn’t really been anyone specializing in scientific thought in Ancient Greece and the Greco-Roman world so far [at Harvard],” he said. “If there’s any room for growth in the classics, a pretty traditional field, it’s in disciplines on the edges.”

Schiefsky said he approaches the history of science in a way that “gives a lot of weight to actual practitioners,” pointing out that ancient doctors and craftsmen were often able to utilize practical knowledge before the theories behind their findings had been discovered. One example is the invention of the catapult well before Archimedes explained the principle of the lever.

Schiefsky is also working to integrate modern technology into ancient studies. One of his initiatives, the Archimedes Project, is a National Science Foundation-funded effort that works on putting digitized versions of ancient texts online.

While Schiefsky felt that his teaching evaluations and performance as director of undergraduate studies for the classics played a role in his tenure decision, he mainly credited his non-traditional probing of an old-school field.

“Harvard is still a research university,” he said, “and I think we need to take research very seriously.”

ANTRÀS: THE EARLY BLOOMER

Pol Antràs fits into a more classic mold of senior professor—one whose research put him in line for a permanent appointment.

Antràs, an economist, has studied within-firm international organization of production and is now investigating the impact of nations that invest in other countries’ elections.

He is also examining the effects of outsourcing on economies, which he said makes “the big majority of people better off.”

Pedagogy was not central to his tenure case, Antràs professed, as he has taught mostly “very small” courses.

“There is no way I would have gotten tenure this early if I hadn’t done the research I’ve done,” he said, referring to his promotion at age 32, after only about five years at Harvard.

Now that Antràs no longer has to worry about job security, he plans to focus more on long-term research projects.

“There’s a view out there that you can get tenure and just sort of relax. There’s still pressure, though, because it’s like, ‘Oh wow, you got tenure so early,’” he said. “But now I can invest in more things I know less about.”

—Staff writer Maxwell L. Child can be reached at mchild@fas.harvard.edu.