For Junior Professors, Rising Prospects

For many high school seniors, coming to Harvard seems like the fast track to success.

But for aspiring young academics hoping for an eventual tenured position, a junior professorship at Harvard has not always offered the same guarantee.

“My advisers were concerned that it would be a tough environment, an environment that would chew me up and spit me out,” says Assistant Professor of Psychology Wendy B. Mendes, who moved to Harvard in 2004 from the University of California, San Francisco.

And Mendes isn’t alone: within the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, people from the newest faculty to the top deans say Harvard has a reputation for offering few advancement opportunities to junior faculty members.

In past decades, “we and a few other universities almost exclusively promoted to tenure from the outside,” says Dean of the Faculty William C. Kirby, who himself was a professor and dean at Washington University in St. Louis before assuming a tenured position at Harvard. “That’s a reputation we earned in spades in the 1970s and 1980s.”

It’s a reputation that Harvard is working hard to change. While administrators insist that the standards for tenure haven’t been—and shouldn’t be—lowered, they say that Harvard is working harder to treat every junior faculty member like a potential tenure candidate.

With a bevy of improvements in recent years—such as more transparent procedures for promotion reviews and better mentoring—members of the faculty generally agree that conditions are improving at the bottom of the tenure ladder.

“Reputations are always going to be slower to adjust,” says Mendes. But “without question, the [current] reputation versus the reality are incongruent.”

Mendes, whose corner office in William James Hall offers sweeping views of Cambridge, says she has been extremely well-supported by her department.

And while she says she understands that tenure at Harvard is far from guaranteed, Mendes says she at least feels that she has a shot.

“The goal here at Harvard, and it’s a fair goal, is to hire the best,” she says. “The threshold is high...there is also no shame in not getting tenure at Harvard.”

But most importantly, Mendes says, “[my department has] been very clear with me and my colleagues about what it will take to get tenure....If they were ambiguous, then I would be skeptical.”

‘THE IRON LAW’

When History Department Chair Andrew D. Gordon ’74 received his Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Civilizations from Harvard in 1981 and took a position as an assistant professor of Japanese history, he says he knew it was a position “with essentially no prospect offered for tenure.”

His situation was far from unusual. For much of the 20th century, administrators used the “Graustein formula,” a complicated series of charts, to determine when Harvard departments could make permanent appointments. If a junior faculty member’s term was going to end in a year when the formula didn’t allow a permanent appointment to be made in his field, he was out of luck.

In Gordon’s case, “there was already a professor of Japanese history and he wasn’t going anywhere soon.”

“In a certain sense, it was very clear and straightforward,” says Gordon, who moved to Duke and then returned to Harvard in 1995.

But other junior faculty members have not always understood their tenure prospects so clearly.

A 1954 FAS committee report on “The Behavioral Sciences at Harvard” looked in depth at “the iron law of Graustein” and found an environment where “some junior men nourish expectations [of promotion] which have regrettably little chance of being fulfilled.”

“I don’t know what my standing is,” said one anonymous non-tenured faculty member interviewed for the 1954 report. “I’ve seen enough with what happens to people when they’re up on the five-year up-or-out to be quite disenchanted with the lower hierarchy around here....I feel uprooted....I feel transient...I have no special reason to stay [at Harvard.]”

Professors say Harvard paid little attention to training junior faculty members partly because administrators believed professors could always be recruited back to Harvard after distinguishing themselves at other institutions.

“There was a time when Harvard could make a phone call and say ‘do you want to come back?’” says Maria Tatar, dean for the humanities.

“Now people’s lives are more complicated,” she says. “Just because you get a call from Harvard doesn’t necessarily mean you are going to take the position....You may be trying to lure back a faculty member with a spouse [who] might not be so ready to pack the bags and go to Harvard and who is quite happy at the new home institution.”

OPENING DOORS

Since the early 1990s, administrators—including Kirby and University President Lawrence H. Summers—have tried to be more open with junior faculty members about tenure possibilities and expectations.

“People do understand now that they are being asked to join a faculty in which we would want them and expect them to be full participants,” says Kirby.

To signal Harvard’s desire to welcome tenurable junior faculty, Kirby announced in February 2005 that departments could advertise assistant professorships as “tenure-track.”

While most of Harvard’s peer institutions have labeled their junior professorships as tenure-track for years, Harvard had long forbidden the practice.

A junior position at Harvard is no longer a “five year terminal assistant professorship,” Kirby says, so “Why not call it what other universities call it?”

The name change indicates a deeper policy shift, from “the iron law of Graustein” to a system in which associate professors—who are promoted from their initial assistant professorships, if qualified, after four to six years—are automatically considered for tenure.

With this change, professors say, has come a greater focus on vetting possible junior candidates before they are offered even entry-level positions.

“We have moved away from that old model” of hiring young academics without much consideration for whether they would make a strong tenure candidate, says Professor of Economics David I. Laibson ’88, who took a job as an assistant professor at Harvard and succesfully rose through the ranks.

Now, “our untenured colleagues are taken very seriously and only appointed if we believe that there is a serious chance that we might ultimately tenure them,” he says.

THE TENURE-TRACK LIFESTYLE

In addition to offering more tenure reviews to rising scholars, Harvard is also working to make junior faculty members feel more connected to their tenured colleagues.

“There was a story going around when I was an assistant professor in history [in the early 1980s] that there was a point of pride among some of the tenured professors not to know the names of the non-tenured professors,” Gordon says.

“Nobody would dare make that boast now,” even jokingly, he says, adding that tenured professors in the history department now work as mentors for assistant and associate professors.

Many junior professors also get to participate more in their departments’ decision-making processes than they have in the past.

The psychology department “used to have separate faculty meetings for ‘permanent members’ and for ‘all faculty,’ and important matters only got discussed with permanent members,” writes Yuhong Jiang, an assistant professor who came to Harvard in 2003. “Now we only have the ‘all faculty’ meetings and important stuff gets discussed across the whole department.”

Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology David R. Liu ’94 says he experienced the warming toward junior faculty in Harvard’s atmosphere.

Like Mendes, when Liu completed his doctorate at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1999, he says he was warned about Harvard’s conditions for junior faculty.

But he found an environment that welcomed him with open arms.

“I simply could not have imagined a more supportive or educational environment for a new professor than the environment I experienced in Harvard’s Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology,” writes Liu, who received tenure in 2005, in an e-mail.

“This kind of environment in which junior faculty members participate fully in all aspects of the department...naturally engendered a deep sense of loyalty to my department and to Harvard.”

Kirby, pointing to appointments like Liu’s, says he is happy to see people who were once warned about coming to Harvard thriving in the new environment.

“We have rocketed to tenure a number of outstanding colleagues,” he says, and in many departments, the old Harvard reputation is “now an outdated one.”

Yet Kirby says the job is not complete. While the sciences are quickly moving to promote from within, he says the humanities fields still need a few years.

“I think it’s too early to say that we have improved rates of junior promotion” throughout the Faculty, he says. “We have to look back in four or five years.”

—Emily J. Nelson contributed to the reporting of this article.
—Staff writer Evan H. Jacobs can be reached at ehjacobs@fas.harvard.edu.