Star Power

Newspapers across the northeast, and indeed across the nation, were filled this year with stories about Harvard faculty leaving. Some articles even warned of a “brain drain.”

The epic story of whether Fletcher University Professor Cornel R. West ’74 would stay at Harvard or jump ship to Princeton after his falling-out with University President Lawrence H. Summers made the front page of the New York Times and brought the Rev. Jesse Jackson to campus to, as he said, “investigate.”

Similiarly, news that K. Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis “Skip” Gates Jr. might leave too brought discussion that Harvard’s famed Afro-American studies “Dream Team” might be dismantled.

Harvard faculty come and go regularly over the years—this year five full professors will depart from the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) while 18 have been added.

This year, though, seemed different.

Six of the University’s biggest names announced they are heading away from Cambridge, a city that shuts down at night, to New York, the city that never sleeps.

Four stars—West, Appiah, Anne-Marie Slaughter and her husband Andrew Moravcsik—will join the Princeton faculty.

Two others—Jeffrey D. Sachs ’76 and Carol Gilligan—will head to the heart of the city at Columbia and New York University (NYU) respectively.

Their departures all made news; they each left for different reasons.

While faculty and administrators say the departures do not jeopardize Harvard’s status as the nation’s premiere university, their reasons for leaving point to potentially troubling trends Harvard will face in the coming years.

Falling Behind?

In addition to being the nation’s oldest university, Harvard has the largest endowment—$18.3 billion. Its library system is second only in size to that of the Library of Congress in the U.S. Its football team topped the Ivies after going undefeated this past fall.

But Cambridge is not New York City.

Both the New York- and Princeton-bound say proximity to the city that is a cultural mecca, worldwide financial center and governmental hub was a major factor in their decisions to leave Cambridge.

Sachs, who is Stone professor of international trade and directs Harvard’s Center for International Development, will depart his alma mater for the first time since 1972, when he arrived as a first-year.

Sachs has established himself as an internationally renowned economist who is currently advising United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan on how to achieve the U.N. Millennium Development Goals—a major global initiative to cut worldwide poverty in half by 2015.

But while Sachs says he has loved both Harvard and the Boston area, he could not resist the combined attraction of the U.N. offer and the directorship of Columbia’s Earth Institute.

“The combination of those two was exciting and would allow me to pursue my central academic interest and passion,” Sachs says.

The Earth Institute focuses on economic development without environmental damage, bringing together hundreds of Columbia faculty, including social, biological and physical scientists.

“It’s hard for any place to match the range and depth Harvard has,” Sachs says. “But in my case, it doesn’t have the U.N., and it hasn’t made the same kinds of investments in sustainable development.”

University Provost Steven E. Hyman, who coordinates interfaculty initiatives, says that while Harvard has centers for the study of Latin America and Asia, he admits that the University is “relatively thin” on the subject of Africa.

Much of Sachs’ work in developing countries involves the impoverished nations of Africa, where he will travel as part of his duties for the U.N. post.

Hyman adds that the additional departure of Appiah “has left some holes” in his plans to develop initiatives relating to Africa.

Appiah is Carswell professor of Afro-American studies and of philosophy and, until recently, chaired the Committee on African Studies.

For his part, Appiah says he is leaving Harvard for Princeton to be closer to his home and his partner in New York—he has commuted almost daily to Cambridge for seven years—and not because of any dissatisfaction with Harvard.

“I realized that I was very worn down by the past seven years,” Appiah says. “It was not so much that I couldn’t do those things [at Harvard], but I could do them [at Princeton].”

Appiah, West and Gates—who now says he will remain at Harvard at least temporarily—headlined the “Dream Team” that transformed Harvard’s Afro-American studies department into the nation’s best.

While Appiah and West are leaving despite Harvard’s recent dominance in the field, Anne-Marie Slaughter, who holds a dual appointment at Harvard Law School and the Kennedy School of Government, says she is heading to Princeton because of its reputation for excellence in studies of international law.

She says she will have an opportunity—the deanship of Princeton’s prestigious Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs—that Harvard simply cannot offer her.

“As an international lawyer who spends a great deal of time on foreign policy, it is a chance to return to my intellectual roots,” she says.

But Williams Professor of History and Political Science Roderick MacFarquhar, who chairs Harvard’s government department, says that Harvard’s resources for the study of international affairs are among the top in the nation.

“We have a center for international affairs that is enormously active,” he says. “Most places don’t have [comparable] centers.”

Associate Professor of Linguistics Bert Vaux, who has been a vocal critic of Harvard’s tenure process since he was told in January that the Linguistics department did not wish to tenure a professor in his area, says that faculty must weigh Harvard’s draws against its “insane bureaucratic system.”

“It’s really tricky, because Harvard is in so many ways the best place to be, because we have the best students, and we have the best library, and we have the best academic city, and it’s very convenient to get around,” he says. “That for most people outweighs the drawbacks of Harvard.”

Harvard’s bureaucracy was also a factor in the departure of Carol Gilligan, Graham professor of gender studies, who announced March 2001 that she would accept a post at NYU beginning this fall.

While Gilligan was unavailable for comment for this story, she said in an interview last year that NYU would offer her more “breadth” in research and teaching than Harvard.

Friends said last year that she was frustrated with Harvard’s lack of interdisciplinary opportunities—which Summers and Hyman have said will be a priority in their young administration.

At NYU, she will work primarily in the School of Education but will have a joint appointment the Law School.

Since 1988, the NYU Law School has successfully recruited six professors from Harvard Law School.

A New York State Of Mind

Some departing professors say that, culturally, no city—not even one with Boston’s history and intellectual reputation—can compare to New York.

“My husband and I love New York, primarily for the cultural opportunities—the opera, above all, but music of all kinds,” Slaughter writes in an e-mail. “We spend a great deal of time now going down to New York for weekends; that will obviously continue from Princeton.”

Appiah has said he feels New York is a more “exciting” place than Boston.

But Hyman says the two cities are very different—Boston offers academic opportunities while New York’s offers a more worldly atmosphere.

“New York is an interesting place for people with an activist agenda, but there are no advantages for people with a scholarly agenda,” says Hyman. “What we do best [in Boston] is develop new knowledge that can be used for activism.”

James Devitt, a spokesperson for Columbia University, says the school’s location is often a selling point for top-notch professors.

“The people we attract here often have domestic and international interests,” he says. “This is an international city.”

Professors say that Boston is an academically focused city, home to more than 50 colleges—including many top-tier universities.

“It’s not that [New York is] more intellectually stimulating,” says Associate Professor of Government Eva Bellin. “It’s a context that provides professional and economic opportunities for dual career couples.”

Bellin says she had hoped this year to head for Princeton, where receiving tenure in her field of Middle East politics would have been more likely, although the job did not come through.

Slaughter—whose husband Andrew Moravcsik is a professor of government at Harvard and will join her as a visiting professor at Princeton next year—says Boston and New York offer comparable opportunities for two-career couples.

Although Moravcsik says he has a standing offer from Princeton, he says he will decide in the future whether to leave Harvard for good or commute from Princeton.

Predator or Prey?

Despite the departures of these professors, many Harvard faculty and administrators stress that faculty interchange between top universities is both normal and expected.

“Academia is an itinerant profession,” says David L. Carrasco, Rudenstine professor of Latin American Studies, who came to Harvard from Princeton last fall.

“All these universities are always competing for the top stars,” Bellin says. “Harvard is routinely cannibalizing other universities.”

Faculty add that because the departures have been the focus of national media attention, the natural reaction is to exaggerate the loss that Harvard faces.

“I’d say that some of these moves have taken on a larger-than-life quality,” Hyman says.

MacFarquhar adds that the general public views the prominence of departing professors as more significant than the numbers.

“I don’t know if it’s unusual or not, I don’t think it’s unusual but it’s just that the departures from one department have been of massive public interest,” MacFarquhar says.

Officials say that, even in light of the current departures, far more faculty come to Harvard from other universities than leave.

Even those who are leaving say they will miss the University’s intellectual atmosphere and rigor.

“I think one can quite fairly say that while there are some significant scholars and teachers who are departing for other places, this remains an outstanding faculty,” says Professor of Government John Mark Hansen, who will become dean of the social sciences division at the University of Chicago this fall. “‘Brain drain’ overstates it by an order of magnitude.”

While six junior faculty members at the Graduate School of Education are leaving this year, only one tenured professor—Gilligan—has jumped ship.

And although Slaughter is leaving the Law School, it has plans to add 15 new faculty members over the next decade and has already hired two tenured faculty for next year.

However, West’s departure will certainly be a blow for the Divinity School’s academic stature and to its diversity, since it now has only two black faculty members.

Yet the school has recruited Carrasco, from Princeton, as well as Hershey Professor of Buddhist Studies Janet Gyatso and Warren Professor of the History of Religion in America Robert Orsi from other schools in the past year.

On the other hand, linguistics professor Vaux says “there’s no excuse” for Harvard not to retain its top professors, except in a few special cases like that of Sachs, who needed to be near the U.N.

“It’s so easy to pull things off, given the advantages we have over other schools,” Vaux says. “Whenever you see someone leaving or see a department that’s ranked low, it’s due to mismanagement.”

But Sachs says it was natural for even a university with as many resources as Harvard to lose out in some areas.

“Harvard will choose its own investments,” he says. “It’s got a spectacular capacity in so many research areas.”

And while incoming FAS Dean William C. Kirby describes the loss of professors as “disappointing,” he remains optimistic.

“On the whole, Harvard is a place in which the balance of trade had been very positive,” says Kirby. “There are many institutions in the country that will want to have our colleagues.”

—Staff writer Kate L. Rakoczy contributed to the reporting of this story.

—Staff writer Jenifer L. Steinhardt can be reached at steinhar@fas.harvard.edu.

—Staff writer Elisabeth S. Theodore can be reached at theodore@fas.harvard.edu.