A New Kind Of Tension In Robinson

Things have been tense in Robinson Hall for quite some time. The History Department has been split by department factionalism, there are frequent complaints about faculty-graduate student interaction, and to top it off the job prospects for history Ph.D.'s are among the worst in the academic community.

But in the last few weeks, the department's angst has been focused on a particular--and very concrete--issue: money. The department's tenured American history faculty has easy access to substantial summer stipends, and other senior members of the department have come to feel it just isn't fair.

The summer stipend--as much as 22 per cent of a professor's salary--comes from the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History, and only scholars in American history are eligible.

Dean Rosovsky said this week that many Faculty members get stipends for summer research, but usually the money comes from outside the University rather than from endowed research centers.

Certainly many of the senior History faculty who do not have access to the Warren Center funds seem to feel something unusual is going on.

The Americanists--most of whom serve as members of the center's board of directors--allocate the money among themselves and require no statement of how the funds are spent.

The center's annual report does not mention the summer stipend expense, but it apparently comes to 15 to 20 per cent of the center's yearly income, which also pays for post-doctorate graduate and undergraduate research and the chairs of three American history professors.

No one claims that the Americanists are acting outside the terms of the center's endowments, but several senior members of the History Department said this week they feel the Warren Center alters the pay scale in the department, making it a "star system" rather than the across-the-board equity Harvard technically maintains.

Other members of the department complain that the money should go to fund the research of outside scholars--for instance, by expanding the Warren Fellows program, which brings 15 to 20 post-doctoral researchers to Harvard each year--rather than to fund the research of the Americanists, many of whom are well-known scholars and could get research money from sources outside the University.

Not all the Americanists accept summer stipends from the Warren Center, but several of them said this week they do not feel there is anything wrong with the system as it now operates.

"It's simply a matter of some people getting more money than others," one senior Americanist said this week. "Each person would like everybody to get the same salary, as long as he gets a little more."

Whatever the moral issues involved, the splits in the department seem to have played a large role in the decision of David S. Landes, Goelet Professor of French History and a noted scholar of European economic history, to switch into the Economics Department this July.

Landes, who frequently taught courses listed under both the History and Economics Departments, declined to discuss the reasons for his decision this week.

But because most historians do not have such easy routes out of the department's tensions, the debate over the Warren Center is likely to go on for some time.