Highlights from the Tenure Report

1. Rank, 'Tenure, and Salaries

The plan here proponed is severely competitive. The Committees does not seek in conceal that fact, but rather in make it clear, and especially in the competitors. It would hope that a selective system by which the University calls more than it can choose, and profits by their temporary services, may still afford a coveted opportunity to young scholars and teachers an opportunity to pursue the vocation of scholarship, to require experiences in teaching, and to establish themselves permanently in their profession whether at Harvard, or, through the good offices of Harvard, elsewhere.

11. Criteria of Selection

The discontent which prevails among many of the younger members of the Harvard teaching staff is due largely to a sense of uncertainty.

In a university, scholarship is not to be considered as a purely personal attainment, but as a benefit to society. It may be embedded in the printed word, and read; or in lectures and personal conferences, and heard. Ordinarily scholarship will assume both forms, and they are of equal dignity.

Between teaching and scholarship there is in principle no confluent whatever, since teaching is a manifestation of scholarship, and scholarship a condition of teaching.

III. Administration and Procedure

It sometimes happens that a department has lost its specialized competence, through falling to keep abreast of developments in its field. It may then need, through the intervention of the Administration, to be reconstituted, or to receive an infusion of "new blood."

In general, the relation between the department and the Administration in the matter of choice of personnel should be one of collaboration and frank interchange of views, rather than of successive and independent inquiries in which a higher authority merely supersedes and overrules a lower.

In principle the larger the number of members of a department who vote on given recommendation, the greater the likelihood that the decision will reflect broad and representative estimates, and a consideration of different attitudes and points of view.

The idea of "election: to valances should, in the opinion of the Committee, supersede the traditional idea of "promotion."

1V. Extramural Relations

To summarize the Committee's conclusions, Harvard University should recruit and continue to recruit its faculty from men of diverse views, especially in fields in which scholars of repute are in disagreement on fundamental issues. The selection of its staff should, provided men of high intellectual capacity be found, include those whose views may be not only academically unconventional, but distasteful to the general public to the business community, to alumni or to any other group.

There are types of scholarship which suffer no harm from being confined in an very tower which is furnished only with books or laboratory apparatus; there are others which are enriched by broad human sympathies and experience. Although a university lives within walls as a world apart, there must be perpetual commerce with the world outside in order that the university may both enlighten and be nourished by the civilization of its time and place.