When junior Faculty members-assistant and associate professors with-out tenure-arrive at Harvard, they move into their new offices and acquaint themselves with Widener Library.

Then they start searching for a new job.

"To put it plainly, I do not know anyone who is not looking at the job market, with different levels of intensity," says Nicola Di Cosmo, associate professor of Chinese and inner Asian history in East Asian Languages and Civilizations.

Academic jobs without tenure are always precarious. But the 200 junior professors currently in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) face a different predicament than their colleagues at other universities.

Most institutions hire junior professors directly into tenure-track positions. If they achieve promotion to full professor, they will gain the right to keep their academic appointment as long as they want it.

But Harvard does not have a tenure-track system. Generally, assistant professors in FAS receive contracts for five years. If they receive promotion to associate professor, they can stay an additional three years. After that period, they come up for tenure review.

Harvard's record of tenure from inside is well known in the academic world. In 1995-96, only 30 percent of all 30 tenure offers in FAS went to junior Faculty members already in the University; 33 percent of all tenure decisions in the previous five years appointed Harvard junior professors to tenured positions, according to this year's budget letter from Dean of FAS Jeremy R. Knowles.

Harvard's unique tenure system has numerous consequences, including allowing the University to run junior professors through a working trial before offering them lifetime employment.

But the system also creates a tense psychological atmosphere among junior Faculty members, many of whom, as Di Cosmo notes, consider their Harvard positions as temporary from the moment they arrive in Cambridge.

Psychological Warfare

The tenure statistics put a new spin on departmental politics. Junior Faculty members talk about the unlikelihood of receiving tenure "constantly," Margo I. Seltzer '83, associate professor of computer science, writes in an e-mail.

"It's usually perceived as quite a joke," Seltzer says. "In some departments, people just treat a junior Faculty slot as a 'fancy post-doc.'"

Some junior professors say the low probability of tenure doesn't concern them.

"[The tenure situation] is rarely discussed," Edward L. Glaeser, Sack associate professor of political economy, writes in an e-mail. Glaeser turned down other Ivy League job offers.

"Most people feel grateful to have the opportunity to learn here at Harvard," he says.