Junior Faculty Need More Leave

As a junior faculty member at Harvard and a current Fellow of the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe, I wish to express my support for those Radcliffe alumnae who are raising money for an annual fellowship for a junior faculty woman at the Bunting Institute.

While it may be true that such an initiative cannot solve the problem of the underrepresentation of women on the Harvard faculty (as some of those interviewed in your recent article on this subject were quick to point out), it will nevertheless be of great benefit to individual junior faculty women.

Junior faculty at Harvard of both sexes need funded leaves from teaching in order to do the work that will establish them in their fields, whether or not they remain at this University. It is the career development of junior faculty, and not simply the tenuring of women at Harvard, that initiatives of this kind advance. They are an appropriate response to an obvious need. Should junior faculty wish to take additional leave, they must do so at their own expense or seek outside funding.

Yet foundation and research funding is not widely available in all fields, and the residential fellowships offered by many institutions require that one undertake the costly and difficult task of moving offices, books and, often, families, for periods as short as one semester or one year.

I would like to see a more generous leave policy introduced for the junior faculty in general; barring that, however, I think we should thank those Radcliffe alumnae who have sought to do something practical for at least a few junior faculty women. --Susan Pedersen   Associate Professor of History