Tenure Berkowitz And Honig

President Neil Rudenstine has unfortunately foregone an opportunity to tenure two fine professors in the government department. Peter Berkowitz and Bonnie Honig, each of whom the President turned down for tenure last week despite their department's nomination, are not just stellar academics. They are also excellent teachers, a quality with which we, as students, are highly concerned. Honig and Berkowitz have both exhibited a dedication to undergraduates during the time they have spent here, perhaps because they are serious theorists eager to impart their perspectives to a willing audience. While those perspectives are from opposite political camps--Berkowitz is a classicist, Honig a post-modernist--these two scholars had much to offer a department in need of such theorists, not to mention conservatives and women.

We are not academics and are not in a position to evaluate the academic credentials of these two scholars. But both Honig and Berkowitz had more than the two-thirds support that the government department necessitates for tenure. Both Berkowitz and Honig garnered heavy support from the government department and chair of the department Kenneth Shepsle said "we are profoundly disappointed by the decisions." If such a vote and such words are not a determination of one's academic qualification for tenure, then we don't know what is. In addition, we are disappointed that Harvard has, once again, passed over two excellent teachers.

Each candidate would have filled a special void in the government department. Honig would have updated the department to the methods of contemporary political thought and feminist theory in her work on issues such as subjectivity, legitimacy and identity. Berkowitz, following in the footsteps of his much-maligned conservative comrade Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr. '53, would have maintained the living spirit of Plato and Aristotle in political discourse. If President Rudenstine were truly committed to diversity, he would have overlooked the internecine political dissension in the department rather than the candidates themselves in making these tenure decisions. There is a pressing need both for more female Faculty members and for the continuity of a classicist presence here.