New professors without tenure quickly realize, if they didn't already, how limited their options are.

"We are, naturally, quite worried," says Alison Simmons, an assistant professor of philosophy. "A number of people feel that the best thing to do is to take another job before the tenure review rather than take the chance."

The constant pressure to secure a tenured promotion or find a new job can demoralize some junior Faculty members.

"Young Faculty talk about the system all the time," Theda Skocpol, a tenured professor of Government and Sociology, says in an e-mail.

Skocpol says Harvard's long, secretive tenure review process creates unnecessary stress for junior professors.

"The tenure system here-and the need to decide when to move, whether to be reviewed for promotion at all, or skip it-all of this takes a huge toll from our young Faculty, and from those of us on the senior Faculty who care enough to talk with people about how to handle the transitions and the decisions," she says.

Attracting New Professors

Given this atmosphere of uncertainty, how does Harvard attract quality junior Faculty members?

The answer lies in the University's traditional strengths: extensive research facilities and resources and an undergraduate body with a reputation for intellectual ability.

Strong departments, or nascent departments rising to prominence, are another attraction. Seltzer, who concentrated in computer science as an undergraduate in the College, says she took Harvard's job offer because the computer science department was just beginning to build a strong systems component.

"I decided that if Harvard succeeded in making itself a top-notch department, and I wasn't a part of it I'd regret it, so I took the plunge," she remembers.

Seltzer also credits the Harvard community as a draw.

"In my opinion, the answer is most definitely the quality of the undergraduate student body," she says.

But the University has other strengths on which to draw as well. In some fields, Harvard is the only institution, or one of a select few, offering Faculty positions in a prospective professor's specific field.

For Di Cosmo, who studies the premodern history of Chinese foreign relations, Harvard's offer in 1993 allowed him to teach both Inner Asian history and two rarely-studied languages, Manchu and Literary Mongolian.