Tenure and the History Department

Despite what you may be told in University Hall, Harvard is very much like a prehistoric monster, with a rather under-developed central nervous system and many large ganglia called "departments," which control the activity of its extremities. The largest of these is History, chaired by Donald H. Fleming, professor of History, a bald bouncy expert on the American intellect.

The Department has 721 undergraduate concentrators and roughly 200 graduate students. It also instructs more students per year in its 121 courses than any other department. All of this is accomplished by a teaching staff of 82, 24 of whom hold tenure appointments.

Many of Fleming's knottiest problems relate to these 82 men and to their potential successors. The University gives him some rough guidelines in this area, but he and the senior members of the Department wield an enormous amount of discretion. Consequently, appointment practices differ from department to department.

The size of all departments in the University is controlled by the Graustein Plan, which theoretically "froze" each department at its 1941 staff-size. The Plan also determines the frequency with which new tenure appointments can be made; in the case of the History Department, once every 24 years. In addition, the University also provides for teachers to be divided into five ranks, tells the department how many of each category it is entitled to, and fixes the salary of each position.

The History Department has 28 teaching fellows, graduate students who have passed their general examinations and now serve as section men and tutors. Theoretically, they must not spend more than 3/5 of their time on teaching, and are paid $1080 per fifth--the equivalent of one section of an undergraduate course. Teaching fellows are selected annually by a Committee on Junior Appointments, which is made up of senior members of the Department and is chaired by Fleming. They may be re-appointed as long as they are "making satisfactory progress toward their doctorate."

For all but a small number of these teaching fellows, Harvard is merely one stop among several on the road to a tenured position. The chances are that only one or two will be at Harvard ten years from now. This forces the graduate student to concentrate largely on the record he is compiling in his own courses. For if he is to spend most of his life elsewhere, he can hardly be expected to care very much for Harvard's institutional well-being.

The next step on the ladder is an instructorship, and the Department has 12 of these. This position is open only to men and women who have already received their Ph.D., and is virtually unique to Harvard these days. At most institutions Ph.D.'s are known as assistant professors right from the start--a title which carries more prestige, but usually no more money. Even so, Fleming says, it is becoming increasingly difficult to recruit recent Ph.D.'s from outside the University to fill the post, a factor which contributes heavily to the inbreeding which the Department is always trying to fight. Instructors are appointed for a non-renewable three year term, and are paid between $7200 and $7800 per year.

The highest non-tenured position is an assistant professorship, a five-year non-renewable appointment. The Department has 13 teachers in this category, who are paid between $8300 and $9500. Almost without exception, they have previously served a term as a Harvard instructor; but now the institutional scrutiny is stepped up. A recommendation for appointment must emanate from the department committee to the Dean of the Faculty to the President, and ultimately to both governing boards.

It is significant that this position is largely open only to holders of Harvard Ph.D.'s. "It is rare," Fleming says "to bring a man in from the outside at this level." If a junior man is to be brought in, protocol dictates that he be given the rank of instructor.

The next step on the hierarchy, the associate professorship, is largely a cermonial one, for it carries tenure and the implicit promise of promotion to full professor. The History Department has only four associate professors, all of whom will surely become full professors within a few years. The system by which both types of appointments are made is the same, and the only distinctions are ones of prestige and of salary. Men of both ranks are guaranteed continuous employment until the age of 66, unless they demonstrate gross professional incompetence or commit flagrant moral or criminal offenses; needless to say, dismissals are unheard of at Harvard.

Associate professors receive between $10,000 to $12,000 while full professors can earn anywhere from $13,000 to $24,000. The salaries within these ranges are determined by the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and are not even made known to the Chairman of the Department.

The awarding of tenure is taken very seriously, and an intricate mechanism has been devised to insure that it is done as objectively as possible. Although the Graustein Plan purports to regulate tenure appointments, in fact it is interpreted very liberally. According to Fleming, Dean Ford is moving toward a policy of over-appointment because of the difficulty of getting competent visiting professors to replace those on sabbatical. Such appointments are said to be "off the chart." What's more, a man whose assistant professorship expires when there is no Graustein vacancy may be appointed to tenure anyway. The Department will then allow more than 24 years to elapse before its next appointment.

In nominating a man for tenure, the Department once again takes the initiative. It can either select a man from within its own lower ranks or go outside the University. In fact, 15 of the Department's 24 tenured members were promoted from within, and many of those imported from outside had either studied or taught at Harvard.

The Department's recommendation goes to Dean Ford, who convenes an ad hoc committee, consisting of himself, President Pusey, two members of a related Harvard department, and three delegates from the History Departments of other universities, usually Columbia, Brandeis, or Tufts. With such a broad membership one of the committeemen frequently knows the candidate personally. The committee receives both written and oral testimony in an effort to determine if the nomination is in the area in which the department is most deficient and if the candidate is the best possible choice.

While both judgments are somewhat subjective, Ford feels that "the ad hoc committees have been a wonderful thing for Harvard because they keep the departments on their toes." The system avoids the parochialism implicit in a permanent faculty committee on tenure, such as exists at Yale, for it insures that departments cannot blindly perpetuate a single tradition of scholarship.

Predictably the critera for which an ad hoc committee looks in a candidate are scholarly achievement and potential, as well as teaching ability. This does not mean that the candidate must necessarily have published prolifically, according to Ford. Rather, "he must be alive: the constructive influence he may have on his colleagues is sometimes more important that the number of his publications."

Ad hoc committees recognize that publishing is not an end in itself, according to Ford, but they do consider it the most reliable indication that the candidate will be able to grow with his field. There are tenured Faculty members who have published no more than a few journal articles. Nevertheless, in the History Department, Fleming says, "It is very difficult to imagine that a candidate wouldn't have published a book, in many instances two books--one of them being his Ph.D. thesis."

Harvard has chosen to keep the deliberations of ad hoc committees secret and thus avoid the risk of public outrage that might attend the rejection of a tenure nomination, such as occurred at Yale this year in the Bernstein case. It is impossible to know for sure whether or not the committee act as a rubber stamp--whether the refusal of a nomination is a common occurrence, or whether the existence of the committees discourages thoughtless nominations.

Ford and Fleming disagree on the frequency with which tenure nominations are "bumped back" to the Department by ad hoc committees. Ford says that it happens infrequently but that when it does, the Department is free to re-submit the nomination with new evidence. Fleming agrees that such a course of action is possible, adding however, the Dean has been known to blithely ignore such re-submissions.

Though Fleming insists that his department keeps a close eye on history departments at other universities throughout the Western Hemisphere in an effort to discover potential Harvard teachers, either he is nearsighted, or else Harvard University is uniquely adept at training scholars. Of the 24 tenured men, eight went to Harvard College and Harvard Graduate School and nine others did their graduate work here.

The early retirement age is another peculiarity of the Harvard tenure scheme that seems to work against the best interests of the University. In recent years, the Dean of the Faculty has sought to retain the services of elderly men who are still capable of productive work by allowing them to stay on for two or, in some cases, four extra years. According to Fleming, "such a high proportion of the Faculty is asked to stay on that those who are allowed to retire are deeply hurt." As a result, a professor who has the slightest doubt about being asked to stay is tempted to resign near the age of 60 and to accept a position where employment is guaranteed to a later age. This allows him to save potential face and to insure that he continues to earn a living for several extra years.

These are at least two problem areas in the appointments system where reform would benefit the History Department and Harvard. First, because the proportion of Harvard-trained people on the tenured staff (2/3) is so high, the students may get a one-sided view of the discipline. The simplest means of opening the doors would be to abolish the rank of instructor; only in this way will bright young Ph.D.'s from other institutions be induced to come to Harvard as junior faculty members and enter the race for tenure. The presence of the word "professor" in one's title apparently becomes very important to a man who has been a student for more than 20 years.

One line of argument holds that only people who have studied here can teach as Harvard requires--can teach tutorial as well as more conventional courses. This point of view probably overestimates the difficulty