Fixing the Faculty

In 2009, Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Michael D. Smith said the size of the faculty would shrink as it faced a sharp drop in hiring.

In the wake of the financial crisis, FAS spending had screeched to a halt, and an unprecedented ten-year period of growth that had produced a 20 percent jump in the size of the Faculty came to a close.

Two years later, as the School recovers and the deficit slims, departments are evaluating the state of their faculties and identifying the holes that have appeared.

Administrators hope that they will now have the flexibility to fill the gaps and nurse their faculty back to health.

HIGH HOPES

As the severe budget cuts of the financial downturn recede into the past, department chairs have expressed hope that FAS will prioritize hiring in their departments in the years to come.

“I think that Government hiring will be a priority because so much of what we do is a linchpin for those working in other fields,” said Nancy L. Rosenblum, who served as Government Department chair from 2004 to 2010. “Harvard cannot have a superior program in Middle East Studies, for example, without a political scientist expert in the area, languages, and approaches to political problems there.”

Meanwhile, Sociology hopes for three to four more faculty members to remedy a student-to-faculty ratio that has been increasing as more undergraduates trend toward the concentration.

The Economics Department, the largest concentration in the College, hopes its size and its perennially high student-to-faculty will push it to the top of the FAS priority list, according to Economics Department Chair John Y. Campbell.

“I hope and expect that course enrollments and faculty-concentrator ratios will have a strong effect on the allocation, although of course there are many factors that the FAS administration must take into account,” Campbell said.

Meanwhile, the History Department, in the humanities, has also suffered at the hands of budget cuts.

“In every respect the History Department at Harvard in 2011 is not what it was in the spring of 2008,” James T. Kloppenberg wrote in an April email to The Crimson. “We still have first-rate faculty, graduate programs, undergraduate students, and staff, but we all hope that the austerity measures of the last few years—necessary as we know they were—will not be permanent.”

TAKING ADVANTAGE OF THE GOOD TIMES

Back in 2007, FAS announced a plan to grow the Faculty by 25 percent, an ambitious projection to build on the previous decade of growth.

But still unaware of the impending financial crisis, some departments missed out on the window of opportunity.

The Psychology Department simply did not have the space for more faculty members in the already overcrowded William James Hall, said Psychology Professor Mahzarin R. Banaji, the head tutor in the Psychology Department.

By the time the first-floor library moved to another building and other spaces opened up for faculty offices and labs, the FAS hiring spree had made way for School-wide budget cuts.

“[The creation of office and lab space] just coincided with the economic crisis and the University’s decision to become more stringent about growth,” Banaji said. “So we are in a peculiar and unfortunate situation.”

The Sociology Department wasted away the period of extravagance taking its time to discuss and deliberate on possible candidates, said Sociology Professor Michele Lamont.

“We didn’t seize the moment,” she said, adding that the department had proceeded slowly because it wanted to make “sound decisions.”

‘VICTIMS OF OUR OWN SUCCESS’

The changing face of the Faculty has coincided with [developments in the number of concentrators] in each department.

As student interest shifted, some concentrations—in some cases with already low student-faculty ratios—have found themselves struggling to provide the same quality of undergraduate education to more students.

Few departments have seen an upsurge in students like the Sociology Department.

With 88 concentrators and no secondary field candidates in the 2006-2007 academic year, the department now has 202 concentrators and 22 secondary field candidates.

Lamont said she believes that a 2003 hiring spree re-energized the department and renewed student interest in the area.

But hiring in the department slowed when the financial crisis hit.

Two years ago, the department was forced to rescind two unofficial offers it had made to prospective junior professors as a result of the FAS budget deficit, according to Sociology Professor Orlando Patterson.

“In some ways we are the victims of our own success,” Lamont said, repeating a phrase Patterson had used to describe the department in an interview last month.

“It’s difficult to provide the same kind of high-quality teaching we are committed to [offering],” she said.

Though Department Chair Mary C. Brinton oversaw a successful junior faculty search this year, the department’s faculty size has declined by the equivalent of three full-time professors since 2003.

Even departments that have maintained steady concentrator numbers in recent years struggle with perennially high student-faculty ratios.

In particular, the Economics Department and the Psychology Department, giants in terms of number of concentrators, have exceptionally low faculty-to-student ratios for Harvard.

“Our faculty-concentrator ratio is extraordinarily low and this makes it extremely challenging for us to deliver the high-quality educational experience that Harvard economics students deserve, and that we want to give them,” Campbell said.

VISITING PROFESSORS, TEMPORARY SOLUTIONS

When the administration turned its attention to the operating costs of the Faculty, reducing the number of visiting professors in FAS proved to be an easy short-term fix.

But administrators say that these members of the faculty—professors on contract for up to five years—can play a valuable role in meeting departmental needs.

Kloppenberg said that, despite multiple postponed faculty searches, the History Department has faced a diminished visiting faculty budget.

A reduced visitors budget also affected the Economics Department, which saw a significantly lower number of visiting faculty in the 2009-10 academic year. With five fewer full-time equivalents, the department had to cut its popular junior seminar program, which has since been reinstated.

The drop in visiting faculty numbers has, for some departments, translated into fewer course offerings for students.

“The biggest problem in terms of teaching is our inability to cover certain subjects with the current composition of faculty,” Rosenblum said.

Banaji said some fraction of courses should always be taught by visiting faculty, who may have the expertise to fill gaps in departmental areas of study.

“It would be a weakness if we did not have people from the outside,” she said.

But she also pointed out that too much dependence on visiting faculty results in unpredictable course lineups and gaps in the department’s faculty expertise.

Despite FAS-wide restrictions on visiting faculty, the Psychology Department has recently relied heavily on visitors and non-tenure track faculty to fulfill the high demand for its courses. Of the 40 courses currently planned for 2011-12, only 21 will be taught by tenured faculty.

Rather than depend on non-tenure track faculty to teach almost half of the department’s offerings, she said it would be ideal to have them teach one-third to one-fourth of the courses.

But in a department with an already slim faculty, that goal can be met only by an accompanying growth in the department’s permanent faculty size—difficult during the recent budget cuts.

“What budget constraints do is they force you to prioritize, and not to stop spending,” Patterson said. “Even if you have a fiscal constraint you can still prioritize in terms of where you put your money.”

—Staff writer Julia L. Ryan can be reached at jryan@college.harvard.edu.

—Staff writer Kevin J. Wu can be reached at kwu@college.harvard.edu.