April 1, 2005

The Unbearable Heaviness of Being Harvard

By LEON FINK

I recently received a request from the chair of the Harvard University department of history for help in a search to fill a tenured position in a designated subfield (I'm being intentionally vague here) of U.S. history. Neither an invitation to apply myself nor a request for other nominations, the letter rather asked me to evaluate a list of seven scholars, and add others if desired, "both in absolute terms and relative to one another." Less than two years previously, as part of the