Harvard Says Junior Faculty Is Happy

Harvard yesterday released the results of last year's extensive survey of junior faculty, painting a generally positive picture of the status and situation of the Faculty's non-tenured professors.

The Faculty Council, the Faculty's elected steering committee, was presented with the data yesterday and will discuss it through February.

But administrators involved with the first junior faculty survey since 1968 predicted yesterday that the upbeat findings will probably not prompt any major reforms.

"The junior faculty members have an enormous amount of satisfaction with their time here," explained Dean K. Whitla, director of the Office of Instructional Research and Evaluation, who oversaw the survey.

"That's not to say that they didn't have complaints of various kinds."

Problems cited include the slight tenure prospects at Harvard and in the tight academic job market generally; dealing with family responsibilities and teaching loads; poor access to word processing and secretarial services; and incomplete information on research opportunities, maternity policies, and promotion mechanisms.

However, the telling statistic, administrators said, was the 65 percent who answered yes to the question. "Would you choose Harvard again?"

Another 28 percent expressed reservations, and 7 percent answered in the negative.

Two thirds of the 180 assistant and associate professors solicited last spring turned in the 16-page survey by early summer.

The survey results are somewhat rosier than the findings of a Crimson poll of junior faculty last spring, which found just under half of those surveyed to be pleased on the whole with their Harvard experience.

One problem administrators had expected to show up in the survey never materialized at all.

"When we undertook the survey, we expected that we would find some important and marked differences between men and women junior faculty members," said Nancy L. Maull, assistant to the dean of the Faculty.

"In fact we found very few differences," she added. "There are problems for junior faculty members, but they are problems for men and women alike."

Several junior faculty members have speculated that the University was attempting to hide these problems, and have pointed to the six-month delay in the collation of the survey results.

Whitla yesterday denied this allegation, and attributed the delay to the changing of the guard in the Dean of the Faculty's office.

Megatrends

The University's survey, distributed last fall and collected in early summer, was intended to update and expand on the so-called Dunlop Survey of 1968, conducted by then-Dean of the Faculty John T. Dunlop.

Comparisons between the two surveys reveal some demographic trends: junior faculty now are a bit older, less reliant on their Harvard salary as sole income, and more likely to live outside Cambridge, with more women and fewer Harvard Ph.D.'s than in 1968.

The survey also turned up significant differences across departments and across fields, though administrators said it is difficult to make any generalizations from these data.

Of the 17 junior faculty who felt they were on a tenure track, for instance, 13 came from the natural sciences. Natural scientists wrote many more articles than humanists and social scientists, but fewer books.

More importantly, academic guidance and support varies from "systematic in some departments to much more chancy in others," according 10 Secretary to the faculty John R. Marquand.

The Harvard survey is handicapped by the lack of similar studies elsewhere, administrators said yesterday. "We have no comparative data in a serious way for our peers," stated Whitla.

However, the Harvard junior faculty members gave an inkling as to their standing nationwide.

42 percent of the 121 respondents (out of 180 assistant and associate professors solicited said their scholarly output way "above average" in comparison with that of their peers.

At the same time, 42 percent reported that they received no job offers other than Harvard's.

They accepted the Harvard offer most often because of the quality of the students, the opportunities for research and the stimulating environment, according to survey statistics.

On the basis of their experiences, though, a not total of 37 junior faculty members downgraded their opinion of the research opportunities, while 30 downgraded the environment