What does it take to reach the pinnacle of academia and receive tenure at Harvard? While nearly everyone agrees that a faculty member must be a top-notch researcher and scholar, the relative importance of a variety of other factors is highly debatable. Harvard’s president has a hand in every tenure offer the University extends; our next president must understand the importance of this power. Weighing these other factors will be one of the most critical judgments that he or she will have to make. We find two criteria that are particularly undervalued in the current system. The first is a candidate’s teaching ability. The second is the need to hire professors whose academic specialties are underrepresented at the University.

The Search for a President an editorial series Previous editorials: Educating the Educators To the Presidential Search Committee

The quality of undergraduate teaching at Harvard is alarmingly unpredictable. All the pedagogical innovations in the world cannot make up for raw passion and talent in teaching. Because of this, the most effective way to improve the quality of a Harvard education is to hire teachers imbued with these qualities. This can only happen if teaching ability is considered as part of the tenure decisions for Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) professors. Former University President Lawrence H. Summers expanded the importance of teaching experience and evaluations in tenure decisions; the next president must continue this endeavor. And a system which considers both scholarship and classroom wizardry is tenable at a research university; Harvard Business School, for example, already takes both factors into account in its hires.

Additionally, the quality of Harvard’s instruction can also be drastically improved by expanding the hiring of full-time, non-tenure track teachers. Harvard has needless and counterproductive restrictions on how long one can teach at Harvard if one is not on the ladder to become a tenured professor. These archaic policies should be rescinded so that Harvard can attract the best teachers in addition to the best researchers.

Tenuring faculty who are better teachers requires shifting the discussion within any given hiring decision. But addressing a lack of diversity in academic specialties requires presidential intervention earlier in the hiring process. Harvard’s system of selecting tenure candidates, which relies heavily on current faculty to search for and vet scholars, tends to generate candidates in the same fields and subfields as the professors themselves. This problem is quite insidious because the quality of Harvard’s hires masks the underlying problem.

The current structure for hiring new faculty is largely to blame. Departments play a major role in selecting candidates for tenure, and only departments—not interdisciplinary committees like social studies—can hire permanent faculty. This leads to two problems. First, departments often select professors with similar specialties. This leads to concentrations of outstanding professors in some subspecialties, who in turn attract other top scholars and top graduate students. While such a strategy can be beneficial for developing fledgling departments and groups of experts on key topics, it has the potential to leave tremendous voids in which Harvard has few experts. The best example of this is that the philosophy department has no professors of continental philosophy. Not only is there only tangential scholarship in this subfield, but students are unable to gain exposure to this particular area.

Second, and perhaps more importantly, scholars with an interdisciplinary focus, who do not fall neatly into one department or another (or even one school or another), are often neglected. Within FAS, Summers and former Dean William C. Kirby began to address this by creating divisional deans to oversee tenure offers for related groups of departments. This is a step in the right direction, but Harvard must redouble its efforts to compensate for structural problems that repel interdisciplinary scholars. Harvard’s stubbornly rigid system of departments and schools should not prevent the University from conducting research in important interdisciplinary areas. An institution of Harvard’s size and reputation cannot afford to have such large gaps of expertise; its scholarship (and the tangible worldly benefits that come from it) will suffer.

Harvard’s president is in a unique position to influence faculty hiring and composition. The president makes new decanal appointments and meets frequently with the deans of each school, who make decisions at the earlier stages of the tenure process. The president also has the ability to set the direction for scholarship through various means of leadership, such as directing funds towards certain disciplines and helping to endow chairs in them. For instance, in the 1990s, the growth of what is now Harvard’s African and African American Studies department can be largely attributed to the leadership of President Neil L. Rudenstine as well as the respected and ambitious department chair Fletcher University Professor Henry Louis “Skip” Gates Jr.

More importantly, the president chairs the ad hoc committees that have the final say in each tenure case (though in the past, presidents have deferred to the provost to chair ad hoc committees for some schools). In that capacity, he or she has veto power over every appointment Harvard makes, as well as substantial direct influence in any hiring offers. Finally, the president also plays a large role in convincing candidates to accept an offer of tenure.

Harvard’s next president must actively exercise his or her influence in the hiring process. That means viewing hiring committees not as a rubber stamp but as a final hurdle. It also means weakening structural barriers that stand in the way of improving teaching quality and scholastic diversity, even if that means confrontation with faculty who would much rather hire within their own departments and specialties unimpeded. Too much is at stake to blindly acquiesce.

Despite its vast resources and the power of its name, Harvard is only as good as the people who comprise it. To that end we need a thoughtful and active gatekeeper as president.


Previous editorials in The Search for a President: an editorial series
Educating the Educators
To the Presidential Search Committee