Filling Those Chairs

The complaints are everywhere.

Undergraduates hunched over their trays in a River House dining hall complain that senior faculty members take little interest in teaching, leaving such drudgery to poorly prepared grad students.

At a Senior Common Room lunch, an assistant professor talks about the expiration of his contract and consequent unemployment as if it were happening next week, instead of well over a year away.

In a hallway, a junior History concentrator leans against a wall and wonders out loud about a system that will kick his favorite teacher, an assistant professor. out of the University in a couple of years.

At a party in a bravely decorated basement apartment off Mount Auburn St., a former junior faculty member at Harvard clutches the obligatory glass of white wine and holds forth with some passion on the subject of how poorly Harvard treats his class.

Griping by and about the junior faculty is part of the day-to-day folklore of the University. Yet while the questions are raised loudly and often, any answers are seldom discussed. Is the administration aware of the complaints? Aware of the undergraduates' concern with the quality of junior faculty teaching? Aware of the junior faculty's wails about the inhumaneness of the system?

For instance, are junior faculty the best teachers undergraduates can meet in four years, or the worst?

"Both allegations are true," says Edward T. Wilcox, director of the General Education program and, in his words, "utility infielder" for the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. "Both allegations are true in the following sense: Junior faculty members are on the beginning of a death run. They have five years, and they have an inordinate number of things to do in a short time--they must get the book published, they do tend to be given the larger undergraduate courses, they perform a number of duties.

"For that reason many of them tend to disappear from the scene. The angels among them, because they are younger, often have a greater affinity with undergraduates. Therefore, if they're absolutely herculean they show up on the other side of the coin" as favorite teachers of the undergraduates.

Robert J. Kiely, professor of English served for three years as an assistant dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. He says, "Senior faculty often hears the complaint that too much of the teaching is left to graduate students, inexperienced teachers...who also may not be so committed to it, who may be more interested in preparing for their orals or writing their own theses than in teaching. You can have uninteresting and uninterested and boring teaching at all levels. It comes back to a central fact about Harvard, which has to do with its size and student-faculty ratio.

"It's very well understood by the administration that whenever the students are polled about how well they like their departments, how good is the teaching, there's a very, very noticeable relationship between size of department and student contentment. Departments like Geology and Astronomy, for example, are very, very well thought of by the undergraduate majors. Then you measure that against English, Economics, Government, History and so on, the warhorse fields...You finally have a very, very uneven balance which can't be totally rectified by having somewhat larger staffs in the more popular department."

Some of the undergraduates' dissatisfactions may be of their own making, according to David Riesman'31, Ford II Professor of Social Sciences, whose studies of American higher education are basic works in the field. "There is something about Harvard which is idiosyncratic--its enormous allure brings many students here. I see many of them before they come, because they are the children of parents I know, or I'm supposed to know about higher education, and I say to them, given what you want out of college, and the fact that you're going on to med school or law school or grad school, you would be better off in Swarthmore or Carleton or Amherst or any number of liberal arts colleges than to come here.

"But the students can't turn Harvard down. They don't want to admit that its prestige attracts them, because they're anti-elitist. This leads them to want to turn Harvard into Swarthmore, although they knew what they were getting into."

The diversity of Harvard is something the liberal arts colleges can't match and state universities can't afford, and so it should be prized, says Kiely. "But it has to be admitted that there is a penalty, and part of that penalty is paid by undergraduates who tend to flock to the more obvious fields and find themselves in crowded lecture rooms being taught by grad students rather than these more specialized fields where the instruction might be very, very close and personal on the part of the senior faculty because they don't have so many students."

The issue for undergraduates and junior faculty alike then becomes, as Kiely says, that "good teaching, or let's say at least devotion of a great deal of time and energy to teaching, is not very well rewarded at Harvard."

Riesman disagrees. He speaks of a "teach of perish" attitude in the tight academic job market that runs counter to the traditional complaints of "publish or perish."

"It is a partially false picture that only scholarship counts," he says. "Ever since I've been here, and with increasing intensity since Derek Bok became president, one has had to make a case for teaching. The problem lies elsewhere. There have been people on this faculty who've been promoted on the basis of their teaching. The problem does not lie in administration support for them. The problem lies in peer respect. The feeling on the part of one's peers that one isn't part of the field is a far more crucial factor than the issue of promotion itself, which can be obtained by teachers."

" 'Publish or perish' is a little too simple a way of explaining what happens," says Kiely. "What it means is that if you publish well, if your research is really very good, that can compensate for lousy teaching. But if your teaching is absolutely brilliant but you're not publishing anything, it's unlikely--there are a few exceptions--that it will compensate for the lack of research. So in that sense, when it comes down to a tenure decision, there is not equal weight given to both."

In any discussion of junior faculty problems the issue of tenure raises its ugly head. If the undergraduates' major demand on the system is for better education, the junior faculty's must be for more secure employment. The struggle then is to balance the needs of the student and the young teacher and the University. Says Kiely, "I don't see how to solve that except to keep some kind of tenure system and keep a good rotating junior faculty. The rotating junior faculty refreshes the system. But if tenure were somehow or other to be given to all these wonderful young people they would cease to be junior faculty and become part of the system. The fairly shortterm rotation is good for the institution and for the education and also isn't bad for their careers. It's better to be told you're not going to be kept on permanently within a short period, rather than being kept hanging on year after year."

Is all the complaining of the junior faculty, then, merely the normal noise of the system in motion, or something abnormal?

"I think it's abnormal because of the unbelievable tightness of the job market," says Wilcox. "The only question the junior faculty has is not how it's going, but 'why can't I be tenured?'

There is a lot a foot to get rid of tenure, but I'm against it. The greatness of an academic institution is the development of tenure, and out of tenure develops academic freedom: Those are the elders, they have made it.

"Personally, I don't think tenure is good for the whole world, but I'm an establishment type and I think academe should have a series of elders. Tribes end up announcing someone as an elder, and I'll bet in some jungle place everybody is saying, 'That guy doesn't remember what he's talking about--how the hell can he run this tribe?'"

David L. DeJean is associate editor of The Louisville Times.

The Opinion Page is a regular feature of The Harvard Crimson that presents responsible opinions by members of the Harvard community and others. These articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editorial staff of The Crimson.

Harvard Nieman Fellows, like many of their counterparts at the Center for International Affairs and the Institute of Politics, see Harvard in year-long glimpses. Young journalists on leave from their jobs in America and around the world, Nieman Fellows spend their time here taking courses, talking with students and faculty members, and thinking about their work and about Harvard. On this page, one Fellow describes his thoughts as his year ends, and another discusses a problem he has learned about during the past year-the tenure system.