JUNIOR FACULTY

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

Joel R. Kramer's account (April 25, 1967) of the Dunlop committee studying junior faculty at Harvard is uniformly excellent and generally accurate. Some of his statements, however, require correction, clarification, and modification.

1. "The Harvard junior faculty is based on a three-year instructorship followed by a five-year assistant professorship." This remark is totally misleading unless one realizes that Harvard is the only school in the country requiring a Ph.D. in hand for all instructors. In all other major universities (Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Berkeley), a man who actually holds the Ph.D. automatically becomes an assistant professor. Therefore, Harvard instructors (all of whom must have Ph.D.s) would be assistant professors at any other university and would consequently earn higher salaries.

2. "Harvard's junior faculty salaries are not quite competitive." The word quite distorts the truth: no other major American university offers men who actually hold the Ph.D. degree (regardless of rank) $7800. E.g. the minimum salary, for Ph.D.s (in all departments) at Berkeley, Wisconsin, Princeton, Stanford, and most other major universities, commences at $9000. See the AAUP Bulletin (June 1966), pp. 164-95. Further, a junior faculty member at Harvard who does not actually hold the Ph.D. (i.e. an acting instructor) earns $6000.

3. "Most Harvard junior faculty perceive a clear horizontal cut between junior and senior faculty." An exaggeration of the case. This is true at most universities and is not peculiar to Harvard. Senior faculty members everywhere are reticent in their familiarity.

4. "In the English Department, over 75 per cent of the junior faculty got their Ph.Ds at Harvard." The actual number is closer to 90 per cent.

5. Junior faculty are not "provided with such basic necessities as secretaries, telephones, paper, postage stamps." True, and this should be emphasized, but why is there no mention of the unusually heavy work load (i.e. number of hours actually spent in the classroom) at Harvard? Junior faculty at Harvard spend almost twice as much time teaching when compared with men in similar ranks at other institutions (see AAUP Bulletin, LII, 1963, statements of the committee on faculty workload).

6. "Harvard is no longer Mecca" (the words of a Harvard administrator). This is a matter of opinion. George S. Rousseau   Instructor of English