Faculty Moves Away From Power Politics

It used to be that when a junior professor was denied tenure, the department head had a ready-made excuse for the young scholar--"Sorry, we just don't have a `slot' available for you."

That excuse can't be used anymore. Because of a new system of allotting faculty appointments that has been quietly instituted in the past year, department heads no longer have that automatic justification for denying junior faculty lifetime positions.

This does not mean that Harvard's junior professors will automatically be elevated to tenured posts--even if their work seems to warrant the promotion. But the switch, administrators and professors say, may mark the beginning of a critical transition in the tradition-bound Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS).

In the old days there was the Graustein system--a complex formula dating from the 1940s used to determine the number of senior-level posts in each department. Everyone, it seemed, criticized it, and few fully understood it.

The Graustein system was built around a set of premises that most faculty now consider obsolete. Graustein, the Harvard mathematician who invented the formula, calculated faculty distribution based on the assumption that the faculty would not grow and that new academic fields would not arise.

But administrators say the system that has replaced it, which grants each department a certain number of Full Time Equivalents or FTEs, is designed to introduce flexibility and consistency into the faculty appointments process. Perhaps the most important change is that when junior faculty members come up for tenure, there does not have to be a senior-level vacancy for the scholars to be considered for lifetime posts.

As Associate Dean for Academic Planning Phyllis Keller describes it, the new system is "a comprehensive savings account and checkbook given to departments, where the currency is positions rather than money."

Under the new system, department heads, in conjunction with administrators and senior faculty, now have the power to make long-range plans for their department without going hat in hand to beg the dean for each new appointment that is made.

The new system, the project of Dean of the Faculty A. Michael Spence, would provide a department with an annual budget that is expected to cover the salaries of all junior and senior professors for the year. Each department is allocated a "steady-state" number of positions--computed by adding up the number of both junior and senior posts that departments had under the old system--that it is allowed to fill and is then given leeway to decide the exact balance between junior and senior faculty.

Although searches for tenured posts still require the dean's authorization, under the new system, personal power politics and individual negotiations with the dean of the Faculty have become less frequent because departments don't have to lobby for every professor they seek to hire.

"One thing about the Graustein is that not all faculty appreciate how much negotiation was going on between some powerful individuals and the dean," says Arnold Professor of Science William H. Bossert'59.

Eventually, administrators and some department heads hope that the shift will help produce fairer consideration of junior faculty members and an increase in the number of women and minorities on the faculty. That task, as administrators are quick to acknowledge, is far from a simple one--the tradition of the Graustein system will take a long time to die.

Faculty members on both sides of the political fence are suspicious of the new system. Many long-time Harvard professors fear the new way of computing faculty allotments will result in excessive growth in "faddish" areas, Bossert says. Some junior faculty, on the other hand, say the change is meaningless and assume that Harvard traditions are not so easily eradicated.

Most faculty interviewed say that while department heads are comfortable with the changes, other professors don't yet understand how the new system works. And many add that they are hesitant about its implications.

"The faculty as a whole are still in the process of understanding everything about it," says Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education David R. Pilbeam. Pilbeam estimates that it will be at least five years before the system's effects can be assessed.

One test case of the new system is the English Department, where one associate professor was denied tenure last week and another is under consideration for promotion. Some English professors say that Associate Professor of English Joseph A. Boone was denied tenure at least in part because the department's senior faculty still held to the old attitudes that had formed around the Graustein system.

"I think we were getting very mixed signals from the dean's office," says one junior professor who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "With this abolishment of the Graustein chart we were told that we no longer had to worry about slots. But I understand that the [senior faculty who voted against Boone] thought that there were indeed a limited number of slots and that to promote him would take away from future slots."

Lowell Professor of the Humanities William Alfred, who was present at the departmental deliberations on Boone, concedes that at least some of his colleagues "were looking at [the new system] in sort of a confused way."

As one junior faculty member says, "It shows just how entrenched the system is. It is impossible for senior faculty to think outside the old rules even when new ones are in place."

Spence's Agenda

But while the change may seem bureaucratic rather than substantive, its implications could prove to be far-reaching. Spence, aided by a group of new, more activist department heads, has seized upon the system of faculty staffing as a long-range method for insuring that his agenda is preserved after he leaves office.

Spence's goal of improving the chances that Harvard's junior faculty will be considered for tenure here is largely dependent upon his wiping away the layers of tradition that have effectively barred young scholars from internal advancement.

And the tool that Spence has chosen for helping to implement his plan is one uniquely suited to the dean's background and management style. It is a quiet, behind-the-scenes set of changes that Spence hopes to effect, and it is perhaps simpler to build consensus around complex revisions in hiring formulas rather than a straightforward change in policy, professors say.

Spence, an economist by training whose field of expertise is organizational behavior, came into his tenure as dean four years ago with the idea of possibly changing the old system, according to administrators. "I can't say that I intended to eliminate the Graustein system when I was first appointed," Spence says.

"What became clear to me as I worked with department heads on appointments plans was that the old system made it difficult to plan for reviews for promotion of junior faculty," he wrote in answer to questions submitted by The Crimson. "Department heads needed greater flexibility than the Graustein system provided. Hence we eliminated it."

`Faddish' Disciplines

But by eliminating the Graustein system, administrators may have sparked the opposition of faculty members who feel that the old structure ensured that Harvard would maintain its reputation for faculty excellence.

"The principle philosophy of the Graustein formula was stability--that departments should stay at a particular size forever," Bossert says, adding "and stability is probably a very good philosophy."

Bossert concedes that limitations exist to the stability principle: "The principle problem is that the assumption of stability means very little flexibility in having some fields grow as dictated by the scholarly needs of academe."

But, on balance, Bossert says he is more worried that the new academic staffing system may introduce new fields into the curriculum at the expense of more established ones that have contributed to building Harvard's reputation.

"A lot of us are concerned that we not be faddish about our faculty appointments," he says. "With the new flexibility, we worry that there will be great pressure on the dean to increase faculty in those departments that are `hot.'"

For example, Sociology, Biochemistry and Economics are growing fields that Bossert expects to burgeon at the expense of such Harvard departments as Classics and Folklore and Mythology.

But many professors, in particular the department heads who Spence has enlisted in his agenda for change, view the new system as a boon to their departments.

Government Department Chair Robert D. Keohane, who says he prepared a nine-page memo on the new system for the department's faculty, argues that the change is crucial to any attempt to improve the lot of junior faculty at Harvard.

"It gives junior faculty a fair chance to compete for tenure," he says. "We don't want to be in the position of having to say that while you're work is wonderful we just don't have a spot for you."

Keohane says that hiring decisions will be made on a more equitable, and less ad hoc, basis with the new system. "We are always going to have competition--it's very difficult to get openings for new fields," he says. "But now we can have competition on a more straightforward and intellectual basis."

But Psychology Department head Brendan A. Maher says the jury is still out on the new system. "I suspect it will take a while to understand what all this means. When the old system's been around for so long, it becomes ingrained in people's consciousness."

At least, there seems to be broad-based consensus that the old Graustein system had major flaws. And that in itself is a major achievement for an 800-plus member faculty that is almost always resistant to change.