Clark, who chairs the school's Lateral Appointments Committee, which offers positions to faculty members already established at other schools, said many professors who have been offered a position here have refused because of the CLS dispute. He also said Harvard's radical professors, with a few exceptions, have made it difficult to select qualified professors in the first place.
"There is no quick solution to the problem," said Clark. "I hope over time that the Law School will get strong representation from other intellectual movements in the world, not just CLS. Then we could have some genuine diversity" which might soften the radical perspective, he said.
Clark also suggested that administrative intervention is necessary. He said the dean should require outside peer review of tenure candidates, as is done in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and should lessen the power of individual professors to choose their own colleagues.
Dean of the Law School James Vorenberg '49 refused to comment yesterday on either the actions of the six professors or possible administrative reforms in the tenure process. Professors have said, however, that they expect no immediate changes from the dean's office.
Other top Law School administrators also refused to comment. One administrator, however, who asked not to be identified, said "Bator was a major loss, and if it is true that other professors are looking elsewhere, then we have a major problem."
Several leading CLS scholars, including Professor of Law Duncan M. Kennedy '64 and Professor of Law Morton J. Horowitz, either could not be reached or refused to comment on the six professors or charges that the CLS effort has damaged the school's tenure process.
In previous statements, however, Kennedy has called the growth of CLS a "natural transition process" towards a better system of legal education. In a debate with Bator and others, Kennedy called unfounded allegations that CLS representatives have only supported allies for tenure.
Door Number Three
Some professors, not directly associated with either CLS or the anti-CLS group, said they believe the controversy has made Harvard Law School one of the most exciting and vibrant places to teach and learn.
"Today, I think Harvard Law School is a rich, more diverse, more vibrant, innovative place," Frankfurter Professor of Law Abram Chayes '43 said last spring.
"Duncan Kennedy is not the first flaky radical that ever stepped onto the Harvard faculty," Chayes said in the debate last spring. "The Harvard Law School has had, thank God, a tradition of criticism of the society, of criticism of the legal system. That is the excuse for having an academic law school, a law school in a university, rather than a trade school.