Reviewing Tenure Review

A tenured professorship at Harvard is the holy grail of American higher education. Aspiring academics spend years publishing or perishing, always trying to distinguish themselves enough to be considered “the leading scholar in the field” and therefore qualify for an appointment to the University’s tenured Faculty. And like the search for the grail, the path to tenure at Harvard is often a mystery. Partly as a result of this inscrutable tenure process, there have been several controversial tenure cases over the last few years where faculty have said they were treated unfairly.

It is heartening to see Dean of the Faculty William C. Kirby convene a high-level committee to address faculty hiring procedures. The committee should open up the secretive, opaque tenure process in addition to facilitating more internal tenure appointments.

Kirby said recently that one of the committee’s top priorities will be “taking the mystery out of the tenure process.” One idea he floated, making sure that each faculty member has a copy of the Faculty handbook, is a no-brainer. But far more important is ensuring that tenure review procedures are standardized and transparent. Former Associate Professor of Government Peter Berkowitz, whose suit against the University is ongoing, asserted that in his tenure review the Faculty failed to follow its own grievance policies. And last year, University President Lawrence H. Summers reportedly denied tenure to two 54-year-old professors, contradicting the unanimous recommendations of their departments, stunning their colleagues and leaving no room for appeal. The excessive secrecy in every decision makes it easy for those who are denied tenure to point fingers at a faceless “ad hoc committee,” a groups that wield immense power advising the president on tenure recommendations but has no public accountability.

The dearth of internal tenure appointments has been another longstanding problem with Harvard’s hiring process. Members of the tenure review committee have thankfully said they hope to improve the atmosphere for assistant and associate professors, exploding “the idea that an assistant professorship is not a tenurable position at Harvard,” in Kirby’s words. As Summers has said, junior faculty have their best scholarship ahead of them rather than behind—and furthermore, they have usually established close, meaningful relationships with Harvard undergraduates that they lose when they leave to teach elsewhere.

The tenure review committee should vigorously explore ways to make the hiring process more standardized, transparent, and open to junior faculty. But the committee should not allow that worthwhile mandate to limit its scope. Today, only about 9 percent of Harvard’s tenured professors are minorities. The committee ought to explore whether Harvard’s tenure process has inhibited it from diversifying its Faculty. There are several plausible alternative explanations for the dearth of people of color in the University’s Faculty, including the fact that graduate-level research opportunities for minorities have been restricted in the past, resulting in fewer qualified minorities available for Harvard professorships. Yet the possibility remains that factors in Harvard’s secretive tenure process result in fewer women and minority faculty being offered tenure. The tenure review committee, explicitly looking to evaluate fairness and effectiveness in the faculty hiring process, should investigate this possibility.

The significant number of professors the administration hopes to hire over the next decade makes the integrity of the tenure process more important than ever. The University should be commended for taking a hard look at the way it grants tenure; now it must make tenure review bodies transparent and accountable.