Harvard Is Rejecting More Tenure Cases After Departments Approve Them

The power to grant or deny tenure is a prerogative that faculty have long held sacred. But at Harvard, the final decisions to shut the door on tenure cases have increasingly been made out of departments’ hands — and in direct opposition to the outcome of departmental votes.

In a presentation delivered Tuesday to the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Nina Zipser, the FAS dean for faculty affairs and planning, reported that the share of internal FAS tenure applications denied at the departmental level has fallen over the past decade.

Under former Harvard President Drew G. Faust, who held office from 2013 to 2018, the figure sat at an average of 61 percent. It dropped to 44 percent under Lawrence S. Bacow, who led Harvard through mid-2023. Since then — in the two years encompassing the short-lived presidency of Claudine Gay and the start of Alan S. Garber ’76’s term — the share has declined even further, to just 30 percent.

That means that most candidates whose tenure cases were rejected in the past two years had received approval from a majority of tenured faculty in their departments, only to see the results of the departmental vote overruled by committees or administrators at later stages of the appointment process.

The data in Zipser’s presentation did not show a straightforward decline in successful tenure cases. The overall share of tenure-track faculty who ultimately receive tenure — about 54 percent under Gay and Garber — has fallen since Bacow’s term, when it sat at more than 60 percent. But the figure is in line with the share under Faust, when about 52 percent of tenure-track faculty secured tenured positions.

Among faculty who decided to go up for tenure, rather than departing Harvard before review, the fraction of successful candidates has fallen sharply over the past two years. Under Gay and Garber, only about 65 percent of tenure candidates succeeded — compared to roughly 78 percent under Bacow and 72 percent under Faust.

The data presented Tuesday indicates that veto power over tenure cases is increasingly being exercised by higher-level faculty committees or by administrators, rather than by the departmental colleagues of the junior professors who go up for review.

But the presentation did not indicate whether departments are greenlighting tenure cases at higher rates — meaning it’s not clear whether the changes are taking place because departments are saying “yes” to more applicants or higher-level committees are more inclined to say “no.”

In the end, every successful tenure case at Harvard lands on the president’s desk. But cases can take very different paths to get there.

When a junior faculty member goes up for tenure, the first eyes on their application are those of their departmental colleagues. If their case passes a departmental review, which ordinarily involves a vote of all tenured faculty in the department, it proceeds to the FAS-wide Committee on Appointments and Promotions, led by FAS Dean Hopi E. Hoekstra.

CAP consists of Hoekstra, Zipser, eight other administrators — including the deans of the FAS’s three divisions, the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard College, and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences — and a tenured professor from each division and SEAS, selected on an annual basis.

The committee has the power to reject cases outright. It can also approve them, either with or without a recommendation that the case be additionally reviewed by an ad hoc committee consisting of both Harvard and external faculty and chaired by Harvard’s president, provost, or senior vice provost for faculty.

The power to convene an ad hoc committee rests with the president — who can choose to do so even without CAP’s recommendation.

The ad hoc process has long drawn scrutiny from faculty, who have called it a “black box” that allows the University’s central administration to deny deserving candidates tenure without explanation. In 2013, then-dean for faculty development and diversity Judith D. Singer described ad hoc reviews as being “greatly shrouded in mystery.”

Two recent high-profile tenure denials — both of which took place at the ad hoc stage — have only exacerbated faculty frustrations. Women, Gender, and Sexuality studies professor Durba Mitra, whose colleagues saw her as a rising star at Harvard, was denied tenure by an ad hoc committee over the summer after clearing the first hurdles of the tenure process with flying colors.

And one year earlier, Saul Noam Zaritt, Harvard’s sole professor of Yiddish studies, had his tenure bid shot down by Garber after a meeting of an ad hoc committee. Zaritt and his colleagues alleged that Harvard had mishandled the case, pointing to procedural irregularities during the review process.

The fraction of tenure denials decided at the ad hoc level has fluctuated. Under Gay and Garber, 40 percent of tenure denials were made through the ad hoc process. That represents a decline from around 50 percent under Bacow, but still sits higher than the 26 percent during Faust’s presidency.

But it’s not clear whether the numbers show a signal, or just noise. Only around four or five applicants are denied tenure each year, and just 10 negative decisions have been made in tenure cases under Gay and Garber combined.

At Tuesday’s FAS meeting, faculty acknowledged that the sample size was small, but expressed concern about the shift toward tenure denials made by CAP or after an ad hoc review.

“One way one could read the trends on this slide is that more tenure denials are being initiated by deans as opposed to department-level faculty,” History professor Kirsten A. Weld observed at the meeting. “Does that mean that CAP and ad hoc presumably don’t necessarily trust in the ability of departments to separate successful from unsuccessful cases with necessary rigor?”

History professor Mary D. Lewis said she worried the changes would make it harder for faculty to understand why tenure decisions were made, which could have downstream effects on departments’ ability to train rising scholars.

“Having more recommendations reversed at the ad hoc, provostial, or presidential level renders us incapable of knowing what is working and how to mentor our junior colleagues more effectively,” Lewis said.

“How does this shift intersect with the abilities of departments to do good mentoring, when they are not making decisions on which cases rise or fall?” Weld asked.

Unlike previous annual reports on faculty trends, Zipser’s presentation this year did not include breakdowns of tenure approvals by race, age, or gender — a decision that Hoekstra said was made at the recommendation of Harvard’s Office of the General Counsel.

Faculty pressed Hoekstra and Zipser on the omission, saying it ceded too much control over a crucial faculty process to administrators in Massachusetts Hall or to the politicians strong-arming Harvard into axing diversity programs.

“Presumably this data was collected and shared with us because it is important for us and our teaching mission,” Government professor Ryan D. Enos said. “What I hear now is that we are no longer sharing the data because of fear of external pressure, presumably from the federal government.”

The presentation also covered the number of ladder faculty in the FAS, which has grown over the past year despite the hiring freeze the University instituted in March. The trend, Zipser said, can be attributed to higher yields in faculty searches that took place before the pause, as well as a lower-than-expected number of faculty departures.

Zipser also discussed faculty retirements, which reached a 20-year record high during the 2023-2024 academic year, with 28 retirees.

—Staff writer William C. Mao can be reached at william.mao@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @williamcmao.

—Staff writer Veronica H. Paulus can be reached at veronica.paulus@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @VeronicaHPaulus.