Teaching Too

OVER SHERRY AT the Faculty Club and under the antique clock in Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences A. Michael Spence's plush University Hall office, a great Harvard tradition is coming under fire.

Since the days when the roster of any Harvard freshman class looked like a who's who of former prep school oarsmen, Harvard has been using other universities as its private academic farm system. When a new yak dung expert was needed, Harvard raised its glance from its teacup and and cast a look to the horizon, indulgently regarding the faculties of other universities before raiding them for their academic stars. Often enough those bush-league sluggers were only too happy to escape Madison, or Berkeley, or Chicago--places where nice tweeds were hard to find.

But in the last few years everybody but J. Press has discovered the franchise, and academics have discovered that you really don't need tweeds to soak up rays next to the pool of your Pala Alto home. Hot-shot academics--and their professional spouses--aren't quite so eager to jump when Harvard whistles them into the game as they were back when Stanford was a horse farm.

That's part of the reason why Spence's recommendation that the Faculty of Arts and Sciences work harder at preparing its own junior faculty to win tenured slots is a good idea. The astonishing number of this nation's leading scholars who spent years as Harvard junior faculty before rising to the top of their fields elsewhere underscores the sense of the dean's proposal. If the University doesn't begin to take an interest in the careers of those who chose to work here as junior faculty, it is likely that fewer of the nation's top young scholars will elect that choice. Increasingly, hot young academics have opted not to come to Harvard, where they know they don't have a shot at tenure, and chosen universities that offered at least the chance of a long-term position.

The dean's ideas are good ones, and we're as optimistic as we are hopeful that the faculty will support Spence when they discuss his proposal tomorrow. Times change, and if Harvard is to retain its position at the forefront of education, it will have to change along with them.

However, an important part of that commitment to education should be a commitment to teaching, and it's unfortunate that the dean's report does not adequately acknowledge that fact. As numerous faculty members agreed this week, the dean's call for increased research opportunities for junior faculty is also a call for reducing their teaching responsibilities. The junior faculty must do more research if they are to compete successfully for tenure, and they should have opportunities to do it. But as one professor asked last week, "Who's going to do the teaching?"

It seems obvious that if the junior faculty will be doing less teaching, the senior faculty should teach more. But that isn't clear in the dean's plan. We call on him and the faculty to specify a new policy toward teaching as clearly as they have flushed out other aspects of the plan.

The University should not forget its commitment to one part of the community in order to acknowledge is commitment to another.