Making Tenure Work

The tenure system in American higher education is in crisis. Colleges and universities across the country are abandoning the practice of granting lifetime appointments to faculty members, a guarantee once considered necessary to protect academic freedom. Luckily, Harvard has been spared much of this turmoil. No one has seriously proposed abolishing tenure at Harvard; nor should they. Tenure is not perfect, but the benefits of ensuring job security for Faculty outweigh the costs.

For tenure to work, though, it must be granted fairly. And while the principles of the University's tenure system are fundamentally sound, the process is too secretive, and there are major flaws in the criteria Harvard uses to evaluate its candidates.

From the top down, the tenure process needs to be reworked. The ultimate decision in tenure cases rests with the one man least equipped to make the proper decision--University President Neil L. Rudenstine. The process limits the influence of the most qualified judges of candidates, the senior Faculty of their departments. Although the majority of those reviewed by Rudenstine--who is advised by Dean of the Faculty Jeremy R. Knowles and five-person ad hoc committee--receive tenure, it is not uncommon for candidates endorsed by their departments to be denied a tenured position. President Rudenstine has an unlimited authority to offer or deny tenure to candidates, regardless of how strong the department's support may be.

Having an office where the buck stops is unavoidable, and having a publicly accountable University official do the job is preferable to having an anonymous committee make the decision. But President Rudenstine is an expert in Renaissance literature, and he is responsible for too many other activities to be reasonably expected to devote adequate attention to the scores of candidates every year who seek tenure in fields unrelated to his own. The responsibility of tenure decisions should be delegated to officials who can devote greater effort and expertise and who will be held accountable for their rulings. Otherwise, the department might as well have the final say.

The tenure process is also unnecessarily secretive, particularly after cases leave the department. The amount of influence the ad hoc committee can be expected to wield is still unclear. While in some cases, it can sink a department's recommendation, the committee can also be avoided altogether, and occasionally professors are tenured without any ad hoc committee at all.

When the ad hoc committee does meet, no vote is recorded, nor is an explanation of the decision required of its anonymous members. The criteria by which the committee and Rudenstine decide are equally unknown, outside the fact that candidate should be "the leading scholar/teacher available in the field." Although we recognize the awkwardness the committee might face in publicly speaking ill of even an unqualified candidate, it is naive to think that a system which is unaccountable will always be objective.

The problems of such a secretive system became apparent most recently in 1997, when two associate professors of government were denied tenure despite strong records as teachers and scholars. Bonnie Honig and Peter Berkowitz were recommended strongly by their department and would have been valuable resources to the University. To many, Rudenstine's decision to deny them tenure was inexplicable. The controversies sparked by the Berkowitz and Honig decisions could have been avoided by greater openness and accountability in the tenure process.

First, a decision shrouded in secrecy will always give rise to rumors and accusations. When there is a conflict over a tenure decision, the more frequently University officials proclaim the objectivity of the process, the less likely the Harvard community is to believe them. A more open tenure process could eliminate the accusations of behind-the-scenes influence and stacked committees that followed the Honig and Berkowitz decisions.

Second, if the procedure followed in these cases was in fact improper, and a conflict of interest did occur in the ad hoc committee, greater accountability could have prevented a wrong tenure decision. Establishing specific criteria for the selection of a candidate-and requiring that the ad hoc committee justify its recommendation in terms of these criteria--would go a long way to ensure consistency in tenure decisions across departments and to reduce the mystery for junior Faculty facing a tenure decision. Such criteria would also be subject to public debate, giving students the ability to affect a process in which they currently have no voice.

In the long run, though, the University will also have to address a more fundamental problem with its tenure process. The lack of regard for students' concerns has become painfully apparent. Like most of the rest of the nation's colleges and universities, Harvard gives disproportionate weight to research experience in making its tenure decisions.

Equally important qualifications--like teaching abilities--are practically ignored. Junior Faculty know very well that they will be evaluated largely on the body of scholarship they have managed to produce--hence the saying, "publish or perish"--with all other qualifications playing a minor role in the procedure. While the tenure process requires multiple rounds of evaluations of a tenure candidate's scholarship, the University makes no such formal attempt to gauge a candidate's teaching skill.

These skewed priorities directly affect the undergraduate educational experience. Junior Faculty shoulder much of the teaching load at Harvard, but junior professors are understandably focused on the research that will determine their tenure chances. No junior professor should be forced to make a decision between their own careers and their student's educational experience, but that is exactly the choice Harvard's tenure process forces junior Faculty to make.

The University, along with the rest of American higher education, eventually has to realize that a professor's quality can't be measured in published pages alone. Harvard's tenure system must reward truly good teachers, not just pay lip service to the second half of their standard of "leading scholar/teacher available in the field." The University's goal should be to create a diverse Faculty of competent teachers and scholars. Until they do, it is undergraduate education that will continue to pay the price.