Harvard Lacks 'Tenure Track' Positions

I have just read the Jan.7 letter in which my former colleague Philip Brian Harper discusses the denial of tenure to Jeffrey Masten. I myself strongly supported Masten's promotion and regretted very much that it did not happen, but I would like to restate the remarks of mine to which Harper refers in the hope of clarifying two aspects of the Harvard system that are not always well understood.

The first point is that Harvard is not a "tenure-track" institution as many universities are, and has never considered it normal, or even likely, that a newly hired assistant professor would be promoted to tenure in due course. It does sometimes happen here, and I wish it could have happened for Masten, but as I observed to your reporter it is seldom easy to make an irrefutable case for promoting a young scholar at the outset of his or her career when it might have been possible to choose instead an older scholar of the highest distinction and bring that person to Harvard.

It is possible, as Harper says, that an older scholar may resist new modes of thinking, though we certainly hope to avoid making that kind of appointment. But it is at least equally possible that after receiving tenure a younger scholar may grow comfortable, cease to pursue active scholarship and resist new modes of thinking. There are many good reasons for promoting Faculty members "from within," but doing so cannot guarantee that a department will thereby be made more vital and interesting in the long run. In many tenure-track departments the reverse has in fact happened.

The second point is that despite what Harper suggests, all Harvard departments are indeed small by comparison with those at most comparable institutions. It is true that our English department currently has three unfilled tenured positions, but even when these are all filled we will still not be a large department. This means that we do not have the luxury of multiple senior appointments in any given specialty, and we are required to make an extremely strong case for any potential appointment before the President will feel confident in endorsing it.

Much though I wish Jeffrey Masten had received tenure at Harvard, I am well aware that the stakes are high and that the President faces an exceptionally difficult decision when he makes an appointment that will stand for the next fourty years. --Leo Damrosch, chair of   Department of English and   American Literature and   Language