Gov Instructors Promoted

The Government Department has recommended an unprecedented mass promotion of its six Instructors in response to their "great feeling of insecurity," a department professor said yesterday.

The recommendation, which calls for the Instructors to be reappointed as Assistant Professors, must still be approved by the Corporation before it becomes official. However, a Government professor said last night that the department "expects little difficulty" in getting Corporation approval.

The promotions come as the climax of a drive to make the department more competitive in hiring junior faculty members, Francis G. Hutchins, one of the Instructors, said yesterday. Together with an earlier department decision against hiring any more Instructors, the promotions mean the virtual abolition of the Instructor post in the Government department, Hutchins said.

Competition

"Early this year, Sam Huntington [professor of Government and chairman of the department] decided it was time for the department to move," another Instructor said. "We wanted to attract new people from outside. But we had to make some big changes to compete with schools like Berkeley and Yale."

The department's weak bargaining position was caused by Harvard's longstanding policy of hiring newly-graduated Ph.D.'s for three-year terms as Instructors before appointing them Assistant Professors. Since every other American college offers Ph.D.'s immediate positions as Assistant Professors, coming to Harvard means three years of "lower salary, less prestige, and slower tenure," an Instructor said.

"It was impossible to bring people in here from outside when they knew they had to serve as Instructors," Suzanne D. Berger, an Instructor, said.

Attractions

In order to offer more attractive prospects, the Government department decided early this year that it would hire all its new junior faculty as Assistant Professors, Hutchins said. There is no binding University policy covering hiring procedures, so each department is free to decide what posi- tions to offer faculty members.

The new policy was successful in attracting faculty members, but caused problems with the Instructors already in the department. "There was no real personal animosity," one of them said, "but we did resent the new policy. We had served here two or three years, and we were being passed over for people who had just graduated."

The Government faculty recognized the problem, and decided on a solution: recommending all the Instructors for immediate promotion. At a meeting of the department faculty last month, the recommendation was easily passed, a professor said.

Dunlop Report

Several faculty members speculated that the upcoming report of the Dunlop Committee may have influenced the department's decision. Set up last year to study all aspects of Faculty conditions at Harvard, the Committee will make its recommendations in April. One of the Committee's major tasks is recommending a solution to the Instructor problem, a Government professor said.

"Everyone assumed that the Committee would recommend getting rid of Instructors in all departments," Hutchins said. "So the Government department decided that it might as well make the move independently and improve its bargaining position."

Merle Fainsod, professor of Government and a member of the Dunlop Committee, declined to discuss the Committee's findings on Instructors. He also said that the Government department's decision "had not been brought to the attention of the Committee."

Although Government is the first department to abandon Instructorships completely, other departments have faced the same recruiting problems and have modified their hiring policies. Spokesmen from the Economics and Social Relations departments said that in the past few years they have "slowly decreased" Instructorships by selectively offering Assistant Professor positions