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{shortcode-dd08abb0bb2b02bf4881baaa9fb305566107f8d4}o many of her Harvard colleagues, Durba Mitra — an associate professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality studies — looked like a practically perfect candidate for tenure.

Mitra had written two books by the time she applied, with several more projects underway. Her research had been cited to support a ruling by the Supreme Court of Pakistan. She helped lead a major research library at Harvard. And for five years in a row, she received an award for her mentorship of students.

“On every axis, she has gone above and beyond,” said History professor Maya R. Jasanoff ’96. “Her case looks to me like one of the very strongest that I’ve seen in my time.”

But in June, Mitra was denied tenure, the lifetime appointment that confers enviable job security and substantial research autonomy on universities’ top scholars. She will be required to leave Harvard within a year.

No one thinks it’s easy to get tenure at Harvard. Roughly 30 percent of applicants, already the best of the best, fall short. Still, for many of Mitra’s colleagues, her tenure denial hit like a bucket of cold water: If she didn’t make the cut, who could?

In some faculty circles, the decision reignited long-running criticisms of Harvard’s tenure system — a process that a Faculty of Arts and Sciences committee likened to a “black box” that allows the University to deny promising candidates tenure without giving a justification.

And the move thins the ranks of WGS faculty at Harvard. Mitra is among just five ladder faculty with a full or half appointment in the Committee on Degrees in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality. When she was hired, she was the first full-time faculty member in a committee previously staffed through joint appointments. Now, her departure will deprive the already small program of one of its core instructors.

The denial also comes at a sensitive time for the WGS program, whose faculty worry whether their own work will eventually be a casualty of the Trump administration’s assault against diversity, equity, and inclusion and reinforcement of conservative beliefs on gender.

Harvard has publicly defended its academic independence, and Mitra’s colleagues said they had not heard that the University would turn its back on WGS. But they saw it as a sign of shifting political winds that Harvard denied one of its most promising young scholars in WGS a tenured position just as President Donald Trump — the man who has held billions of dollars in federal funding as leverage to exact sweeping demands from Harvard — derides what he views as “wokeness” and “left-wing indoctrination” in education.

“To have a record like that which meets or exceeds many other records that have received tenure at Harvard, it’s difficult for me to imagine that her denial was not tied to the broader political situation,” said Sociology professor Jocelyn Viterna, who serves as the WGS chair.

Mitra declined to comment. Harvard spokesperson Jason A. Newton also declined to comment, citing a policy against discussing personnel matters.

‘We Very Much Look Forward to Working With You’

When Jordan M. Villegas ’20 was a sophomore at Harvard, he took Mitra’s course on feminist theory. Each week, the class would read a canonical feminist text, accompanied by scholarship that built on the foundational works in the field.

For Villegas, the course brought to life how historical ideas develop, scholarship happens, and new knowledge is created. It changed everything for him, putting him on the track to becoming an academic himself.

“Professor Mitra and her mentorship really made that life path open up to me — and made me realize that this was something that was not only possible, but something that I wanted to do,” said Villegas, who is currently a professor of history at Southern Methodist University. “That transformative experience made me who I am today.”

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Multiple students and faculty said Mitra is remarkable for her deep commitment to supporting students, often mentoring them even years after they have left Harvard. But Mitra is also a prolific scholar; colleagues have said her work is “field-changing” and of “clear global significance and impact.”

Mitra is a historian by training with expertise in feminist political thought, intellectual history, and sexuality studies. Her first book, “Indian Sex Life: Sexuality and the Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought,” demonstrated how British officials and Indian intellectuals produced ideas about “deviant female sexuality” that shaped Indian society — and how these ideas were foundational to modern political theory.

“She is like a real archive rat,” said History professor Kirsten A. Weld, a scholar of Latin America. “The depth of the research and the fidelity to the sources and the way that she’s able to pull insights out of reading her archival materials, both along and against the grain — it’s really extraordinary.”

Mitra also has a book deal with Princeton University Press to publish a second major work: “The Future That Was: A History of Third World Feminism Against Authoritarianism.”

When Mitra was promoted from assistant to associate professor in April 2022, Robert Reid-Pharr, the WGS chair at the time, heaped praise on her teaching and research.

“To be absolutely blunt, it is much easier to speak about your strengths than your weaknesses. Your history of research, writing, and publication is exemplary,” Reid-Pharr wrote in Mitra’s promotion letter. “We very much look forward to working with you in both WGS and the larger Harvard community for years to come.”

‘At Such a Total Loss’

Mitra’s work, alongside her administrative experience leading the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, made faculty who knew her confident that she would face little difficulty securing tenure when she applied in late May 2024. And she seemed to easily clear early hurdles in the process.

The tenure process for appointments in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences begins at the departmental level, where faculty members in a candidate’s department evaluate the candidate and vote on whether to advance them to the next round. Mitra passed the departmental vote.

Next, her case was sent to the Committee on Appointments and Promotions, an FAS-wide committee chaired by FAS Dean Hopi E. Hoekstra that evaluates tenure applications. Reviews of her scholarship from external faculty were overwhelmingly positive, according to two people, and the committee greenlit Mitra for tenure in October 2024.

CAP specifically recommended Mitra receive tenure without an ad hoc review, a process that allows Harvard’s president to convene another committee of scholars to reevaluate cases approved by CAP, according to two people familiar with the situation.

But that recommendation was not followed.

In March 2025, Mitra’s case was sent to an ad hoc committee, chaired by Harvard Provost John F. Manning ’82. It is unclear who exactly convened the ad hoc committee, and why. Manning held ad hoc reviews last year to become familiar with the process because he was new to the role of provost, according to the person.

Then, roughly three months later in June, the University informed Mitra that her application for tenure had been denied.

The notification came one week after Harvard’s Commencement ceremonies, and more than a year after Mitra submitted her application for tenure.

“In twenty-three years at Harvard and fifteen as a tenured professor, I have seen a lot of tenure cases. While there have been other denials I was sorry to hear about, I have never been at such a total loss to explain Harvard’s decision,” said History professor Mary D. Lewis wrote in an emailed statement.

Jasanoff put it bluntly: “I was absolutely flabbergasted.”

Harvard’s tenure system, especially the ad hoc process, has long drawn criticism from faculty as unnecessarily opaque and overly centralized around the University’s president. In recent years, several high-profile tenure denials have stirred up controversy about the system. Last year, Saul Noam Zaritt, then Harvard’s only tenure-track Yiddish professor, accused the University of procedural mistakes in his tenure review process after his tenure was denied.

And in 2019, the denial of tenure to Lorgia García Peña, a Romance Languages and Literatures professor and ethnic studies scholar, sparked fierce backlash from faculty and students. (García Peña is now a full professor at Princeton University.)

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Mitra’s case, which multiple faculty said they believed was among the most egregious tenure denials they had ever seen, has already added to growing concerns about the fairness and accuracy of Harvard’s tenure system.

“I, for example, no longer feel confident in the robustness of our tenure-track system,” Jasanoff said. “I just think it throws the future into doubt for our tenure-track faculty and their prospects of getting tenure.”

Weld, the History professor who studies Latin America, said that Mitra had been offered tenure at other top universities, but that Weld and other colleagues had advised her to stay on Harvard’s tenure track given her strong academic record. In the aftermath of Mitra’s tenure denial, Weld said, she would make a different suggestion if approached by another junior faculty member with job offers elsewhere.

“I will never again give that advice to a tenure track faculty member. If a tenure track faculty member gets an outside offer, I will tell them to take it,” Weld said. “I have been put in a position where I cannot accurately and with integrity mentor junior faculty about what they need to do in order to have a viable tenure case.”

An Uncertain Future for WGS

Mitra has been a prolific instructor for the WGS program.

Last semester, she taught two core courses for the committee: its junior tutorial on research methods and WOMGEN 1426: “The Sexual Life of Colonialism.” She was set to teach another course, on feminist theory, this fall.

But that course, WOMGEN 1210FT: “Feminist Theories of Difference,” was canceled over the summer. And her departure will force the WGS committee to turn to other faculty to teach key courses students need to receive a degree from the committee.

Mitra’s tenure denial is at least the second time that the University has blocked WGS from keeping or onboarding faculty. In March 2025, the WGS committee attempted to hire Columbia University professor C. Riley Snorton — a prominent cultural theorist with expertise in racial, sexual, and transgender history who was then tenured at the University of Chicago — to join the program with a tenured appointment.

But the hiring process was shut down by Harvard administrators. It remains unclear why Snorton was denied a spot at Harvard. Both Snorton and Newton, the Harvard spokesperson, declined to comment on the matter.

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Both cases occurred at a moment when the field of women, gender, and sexuality studies has come under intensifying scrutiny from conservative critics, who claim the field lacks intellectual rigor. Mitra’s spring course, WOMGEN 1426, was the subject of a January article in the conservative media website Campus Reform, which draws attention — and often harassment — to the academics it accuses of “leftist bias and abuse.”

Some universities’ boards of trustees have voted to shutter decades-old gender studies programs. Brown University, meanwhile, recently adopted the Trump administration’s preferred definition of gender as binary, a classification many gender studies scholars view as inaccurate.

Harvard administrators have not criticised the WGS program and have said emphatically that they will defend the University’s freedom to make its own academic and hiring decisions. But on campus, there has been a significant shift away from administrative programming on race and gender as the University closes down diversity offices and scrubs references to DEI from public facing websites.

The changes at Harvard and beyond have caused many WGS affiliates to worry about the future of their program. And the denial of Mitra’s tenure application has only heightened that sense of alarm.

“In this context of closing the women’s office, the LGBTQ office, and in the context of Brown capitulating on understandings of gender, it’s hard not to imagine that a tenure decision about a star scholar in the WGS program would not have also been influenced by this political moment,” said Viterna, the WGS chair.

—Staff writer William C. Mao can be reached at william.mao@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @williamcmao.

—Staff writer Veronica H. Paulus can be reached at veronica.paulus@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @VeronicaHPaulus.