CORRECTION APPENDED

More than half of Harvard’s teaching and research faculty are neither tenured nor are on track to be tenured, topping all other Ivy League universities in the percentage of non-tenure track faculty, according to a report released Monday.

The report found that 56.6 percent of Harvard’s faculty did not have tenure on the horizon, slightly above the national average for private research universities, 54.6 percent.

Yale, at 50.3 percent, had the second-highest proportion of non-tenured faculty among the Ivy League universities, while the University of Pennsylvania boasted the lowest proportion, at only 16.1 percent.

The results, released by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), a union organization, were based on data collected by the U.S. Department of Education in the fall of 2005.

“We hoped that faculty members, students, and administrators would discuss the results on their campuses,” said John W. Curtis, the AAUP’s director of research and public policy, who co-authored the study.

The proportion of non-tenure track faculty was different, however, when faculty that only conduct research are excluded from the data. Only 16.7 percent of Harvard’s instructional faculty, who actually interact with students, are not on tenure track, compared to 24.4 percent at Yale.

Senior Adviser to the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) Lisa L. Martin said being taught by non-tenured faculty can both benefit and hurt students.

Instructors who are not on tenure track “tend to be focused entirely on teaching,” Martin said, adding that they nevertheless “might not be in as good a position to advise senior theses and research projects because they are less research-oriented.”

“Lecturers and preceptors often have a heavier teaching load and thus have less time to devote to scholarship and research,” wrote Weary Professor of German and Comparative Literature Judith L. Ryan in an e-mail. “That doesn’t mean that they can’t be good teachers, but it can sometimes make it hard for them to be on the cutting edge of their fields,” she wrote.

Unlike most universities, Harvard only recently approved having an official tenure track for junior faculty members. The University refused to call its junior professorship a tenure-track until former Dean of FAS William C. Kirby announced in February 2005 that departments could advertise assistant professorships as a track for tenure.

Martin also expressed the concern that female faculty may make up a disproportionate percentage of non-tenure track faculty, positions which offer worse pay and less security.

“I worry a lot about issues of gender equity. One thing that is true is that women tend to be much more represented in the non tenure track ranks than in the tenure track ranks,” Martin said.

CORRECTION

Due to an editing error, the headline of the Dec. 13 news article initially titled "Harvard Has Fewest Tenured Profs in Ivies" mischaracterized the findings of the American Association of University Professors report cited in the story. In fact, Harvard is the Ivy with the smallest percentage of faculty who are tenured or on a tenure track.

The graphic accompanying the article should have said that 56.6 percent of Harvard faculty are off the tenure track, compared to 50.3 percent at Yale, 16.6 percent at the University of Pennsylvania, and 54.6 percent at private research universities nationwide.

The Crimson regrets the error.