According to Jones, eliminating the stringent term limits for lecturers and extending annual contracts to two or three years would help to take some of the pressure off lecturers.

But the tenure system is not poised to change substantially.

WORLD CLASS STATUS

According to many professors, a research-based tenure system is the only possible way to maintain Harvard’s status as a world-class university.

“The heart of the University, the majority of courses, are going to be taught by regular faculty who are there for research, and nobody within the Harvard community wants to change that,” Campbell says.

Some say that professors engaging directly in cutting edge research are best positioned to teach future leaders in their fields.

“You need knowledge that’s not in the textbooks yet,” explains Gregory Tucci, senior lecturer in Chemistry and Chemical Biology and co-director of undergraduate studies in the Chemistry Department.

Katherine J. Hinde, who joined the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology this fall as an assistant professor on track for tenure, says she has referred to her own research while writing the syllabus for her spring course.

“I’m actually really excited about it because I am able to teach classes that are directly relevant to the kinds of questions I’m asking in my research,” she says.

Bamberg admits that his classes sometimes lack these connections even though he has spent many years conducting research in the past. He says it can now be difficult to supervise undergraduate theses, which have to connect to current mathematical research.

“It’s very important for fundamental research to be done and a lot of this is only going to be done at universities because the corporate pay off hasn’t turned up yet,” explains Bamberg.

THE COSTS OF TENURE FOR UNDERGRADUATES

Ladder faculty members may be teachers who are the most active in the development of and expansion of their respective fields of study, but they are often not the ones with the greatest impact on undergraduate academic experience.

“People going into non-ladder positions have more teaching experience, and sometimes that is by choice, which means that they are more committed to undergraduate teaching,” Jones says.

“We need to think about what it means to deliver the best education possible to our undergraduates,” says sociology professor Christopher Winship. “Depending on the course and its objectives, it is far from obvious that ladder faculty are always the best or the most appropriate teachers. Our students deserve the very best instructors, no matter what their status is as faculty.”