Faculty Time Caps Hurt Harvard’s Students, Too

The way Harvard treats its non-tenure-track faculty can best be described by the immortal words of Thomas Hobbes: “nasty, brutish, and short.”

There are many great reasons to oppose time caps — arbitrary limits on how long certain non-tenure-track faculty can remain at the University — including the inherent instability for those who accept these positions, mental health burdens, and outright unfairness for faculty who know they will be fired, regardless of job performance. However, rather than relitigating those subjects, as time-cap negotiations between the University and non-tenure-track faculty approach a tense zenith, I want to remind students that ending time caps is not only the right thing to do for faculty — it’s also the right thing to do for us students.

Simply put, we, the students, deserve good teachers. By refusing to end time caps, the University won’t let us keep them. Contrary to claims that time caps inspire new pedagogy or allow fresh blood to enter the classroom, consistency is good for teaching.

First, consistency allows faculty to build relationships with students. A critical mass of Harvard’s teaching staff is on the non-tenure track, including preceptors, lecturers, and others. Thus, much of a student’s academic experience at Harvard is defined by interactions with such faculty.

Many of the best teachers we encounter during our four years at Harvard are on the non-tenure track. These faculty members are our seminar leaders, our advisors, our mentors, and — perhaps most importantly to some Harvard students — our letter-of-recommendation providers.

When non-tenure-track faculty are confined to such short terms, students’ relationships with them are artificially, unnecessarily, and prematurely terminated.

Requiring these faculty members to begin their next job search essentially as soon as they arrive at Harvard surely contributes to a feeling of ephemerality. Under the status quo, non-tenure-track faculty know that it is entirely impossible for them to stay beyond the length prescribed in their contract. In effect, the University gives them no strong incentives to invest deeply in the Harvard community or students during their time here.

Nonetheless, non-tenure track faculty continue to provide outstanding teaching and mentorship, despite incentives to do otherwise; the least we students can do is selfishly follow our own interest in supporting them.

Furthermore, retaining faculty for longer periods allows them to improve their teaching skills. While every faculty member has a unique field of study, they all practice one especially difficult profession: teaching. However, the skills that make someone a great teacher are not necessarily coincident with being a great researcher. There are many techniques that faculty can use to become more effective teachers — but these skills can only be developed through experience.

Time caps arbitrarily cut off the time available for faculty to improve their teaching abilities. Indeed, it is a cruel irony that just when many non-tenure-track faculty members have amassed years of experience, Harvard forces them to leave — depriving students of experienced and readily available teachers with whom they have already developed relationships.

Other universities — including the University of Michigan and Rutgers University — understand the obvious benefits of consistency and have abandoned many counterproductive time caps. Some Harvard schools also recognize the pointlessness of time caps; Harvard Medical School and the T.H. Chan School of Public Health, for example, allow many lecturers’ contracts to be renewed indefinitely. In current negotiations with academic workers, Harvard even appears to be somewhat willing to acknowledge the pitfalls of time caps, offering to end term limits for preceptors across the University.

Most ironically, of course, is the fact that any arguments made in favor of time caps in the name of better teaching practices would surely cut against the policy of lifelong tenure for professors. Whatever pedagogical benefits that may result from cutting short the terms of some faculty would surely be furthered if Harvard expanded this practice to all faculty. If it’s good for some teachers to be limited to eight years, why shouldn’t professors be too?

While Hobbes’s words may aptly capture the current situation, I would suggest that we turn to the words of a time-capped lecturer to describe this conundrum: Time caps make one feel as if they “have to be, quite frankly, really thankful to get bare minimum things.”

Harvard’s non-tenure-track faculty shouldn’t accept the bare minimum from the University — and neither should Harvard’s students.

Matthew R. Tobin ’27, a Crimson Editorial editor, is a double concentrator in Government and Economics in Winthrop House.