Research, according to both senior tutors and faculty members, requires long, uninterrupted blocks of time.

"Academic research and keeping students safe and helping them graduate are two very different and very demanding tasks," Mobley says. "I wonder if anyone can keep them completely in balance."

Dickinson agrees.

"Research for most professors has a very different mind-set. You have to clear an entire day...and just focus on research," he says. "It would be hard to...set aside time that's strictly [for] research."

Lewis suggests that junior faculty members could devote their summers to research.

But Mobley points out that senior tutors' summers are considerably shorter than students.

"The senior tutor's job isn't through until almost July. After [faculty members] turn in the grades, our work has just begun," he says. "The senior tutors are the first people who have to get the administrative wheels greased the day after Labor Day."

Stubbs says he already faces the challenge of setting aside blocks of time away from the House by combining his job at the Peabody Museum with his responsibilities at Currier House.

"Certainly, when problems come up, you have to devote time to them," Stubbs says. "I am certain there will be a time when I'll face [an] overwhelming situation which will make it difficult to juggle."

Stubbs says that in some ways, a teaching appointment could actually be more flexible than another University job.

"I have people who work for me," he says. "I have to be somewhat predictable."

Stubbs says the College should not require senior tutors to be junior faculty members.

"There are lots of people like myself involved in a professional sense in their field who are connected in some way," he says. "I think it would be a shame to totally exclude those people from an applicant pool."

And Moravcsik says he doesn't want to see the College take junior faculty members away from teaching and research duties.

"My experience with other universities...has led me to conclude that Harvard needs to provide more opportunities for junior faculty to do research and to interact with their department colleagues, rather than more opportunities to run the massive infrastructure around here," Moravcsik says.