From the issue dated June 18, 2004
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Hello ... I Must Be GoingMost assistant professors at top Ivy League universities won't be sticking around for the long term
Landing a job as an assistant professor at a top Ivy League university is many a young scholar's dream. It is a seductive environment: brilliant colleagues, world-class libraries, and stellar students. But many assistant professors who make it to Harvard, Princeton, or Yale Universities might as well keep their bags packed. That's because getting tenure at those three institutions has long been perceived as next to impossible. Though they decline to give exact numbers, some administrators say the percentages of junior professors who get tenure have increased over the years. But junior faculty members themselves still complain of unfairness in the system. Harvard and Yale, for example, have no traditional tenure tracks. An assistant professor can work for years without ever being put up for tenure, and then be forced to leave. If a slot does open up, assistant professors must compete with some of the best candidates in the world. Many assistant professors say that creates a disincentive for them to invest energy in their own departments, in the university, and even in relationships with their colleagues. While Princeton does have a tenure track, winning tenure there is considered nearly as tough. Other Ivy League institutions are generally seen as more open to awarding tenure to junior professors -- and they use that to their advantage. For example, Jefferson R. Cowie, an associate professor of labor history at Cornell University, received tenure this year after seven years as an assistant professor there. Mr. Cowie says senior faculty members told him: "This is not Yale. We're not going to fire you," and let him know they were invested in his success. But at Harvard, Princeton, and Yale, just the perception that the tenure process is a dead end can affect the way junior professors approach their jobs. "I went in with the assumption I was going to leave," says Allan C. Stam, a former assistant professor of political science at Yale. By his fourth year, he was already making choices, such as turning down a request that he direct part of Yale's international-studies program, based on his plan to depart for a tenured job at Dartmouth College. "There was not a lot of good will left," says Mr. Stam. While these tenure practices have been in place for many years at the nation's top institutions, a rising chorus of complaint has become difficult for administrators to ignore. Yale is reviewing its tenure system. Shirley M. Tilghman, Princeton's president, has said she wants to conduct a review of tenure throughout the institution. And Lawrence H. Summers, Harvard's president, has said that he wants to focus more on hiring and promoting promising junior professors, rather than on bringing in outside scholars who already have tenure. "We want to hire people before they do their best work," Mr. Summers said in an e-mail message, "and too often we hire people when they're at the top of the mountain, and it can be downhill after that." Some professors say such changes are unnecessary. After all, they note, the systems in place have served those institutions well over the years. And it's not as if professors denied tenure at the country's top institutions won't have good job prospects. Why change now? Naïve or Egocentric? Despite the stacked odds, the top three ivies still manage to attract promising scholars to their junior ranks. They are enticed by the excellent resources, even if they know their time at the institutions will be limited. And tenure or no tenure, having Harvard, Princeton, or Yale on your résumé doesn't look so bad. Mr. Stam, who was hired as an assistant professor at Yale in 1996, says that to assume you will get tenure at Yale you have to be either "maniacally egocentric" or awfully naïve. The same is true at Princeton, says his colleague, William C. Wohlforth, an associate professor of politics at Dartmouth who was denied tenure at Princeton in 1995. But, he adds, "there is just enough promotion from within to give you hope." Mr. Stam says professors at Yale fueled that same kind of hope. "The senior faculty will point to these small numbers of professors and say, 'Look, we tenure junior professors,'" he says. Still, when the political scientist looked at the impressive qualifications of his colleagues who hadn't made it, he turned gloomy. "You say, 'If I can't predict who they're picking and why, ... I got to get out of here.'" Those mixed messages lead to a counterproductive working environment, says Mr. Stam: "As people start to get signals, then they tend to become increasingly detached from the department." Untenured professors, with limited influence on decisions about the department's future, feel disenfranchised. And senior faculty members have little incentive to serve as mentors for those junior professors. While Mr. Stam made his decision to leave Yale early on, Bert Vaux, an assistant professor of linguistics at Harvard, did not. He taught at Harvard for nine years, from 1994 to 2003, and was promoted along the way to associate professor without tenure -- a normal procedure there. He says he was led to believe that the system had changed somewhat from the past, when scholars had to demonstrate that they were the best in their fields to get tenure, regardless of age. He says his chairman told him that he would be compared with scholars in his peer group. "I fell into the normal Harvard trap of thinking, well, it's different now... and my record is good enough ... so I'll just give it a chance." But when a senior-faculty slot opened up, Mr. Vaux -- who had published 31 articles and three books, and had four more books accepted for publication -- was not formally considered. He says his chairman told him he didn't compare well with others in his field. "They were in their 70s," says Mr. Vaux of those he was up against. "They give you this hook that now the process is different, so that keeps you quiet the eight years you are there. Then they do their thing, and you're out." Jay H. Jasanoff, the chairman of Harvard's linguistics department, says Mr. Vaux was not misled by the department and was compared with candidates in his peer group. However, Mr. Jasanoff says he favors reviewing the tenure system as a whole because he objects to hiring junior professors who will later be forced to leave. Douglas Mao, an English professor who was denied tenure at Princeton in 1999, says that he too fell into the trap of thinking he'd make it. He had an encouraging mid-tenure review, and his chairman told him that if he finished his book, things should go well. His book was in print by the time he was reviewed for tenure. But while his department voted in his favor, Princeton's universitywide tenure committee did not. He met with a dean and was told he had achieved only "modest productivity." "What did that kind of gatekeeping accomplish?" asks Mr. Mao, now an associate professor of English at Cornell. "I understand why top universities want to have high standards for the tenured faculty, but I don't think the idea that you deny tenure to so many ... works out as well as it should." The Wheels Turn Ms. Tilghman, Princeton's president, famously called for the abolition of tenure in a 1993 New York Times op-ed, saying it was no friend to women. But she has since changed her position and supports it. She has promised a review of tenure policies and practices at Princeton to make sure they are fair and serve the university's interests, but has not said when that review will take place. The politics department at Princeton is one step ahead of her. After an eight- or nine-year stretch during which no one earned tenure, the junior faculty members in the politics department came up with a frank statement of dissatisfaction. "We thought it was something dysfunctional within the department," says Patrick J. Deneen, an assistant professor of politics who helped draft the statement. Nancy G. Bermeo, a full professor in the department and now acting chairman, decided to do something about it. She led a committee that surveyed all those who had been assistant professors in the department over the last 15 years. The anonymous questionnaire asked about the tenure-review process, which is considered especially grueling at Princeton. The four-member committee, which included Mr. Deneen, found that even professors who had been tenured from within were not happy with the process, Ms. Bermeo says. The most striking finding was that many assistant professors felt they were not getting adequate comment and advice on their work, especially from the senior faculty. Junior professors were often reluctant to show their work to their more-experienced colleagues. "People can get so nervous about presenting their work until it's perfect," says Dartmouth's Mr. Wohlforth. The committee's reforms, which were passed last fall, focus on helping junior faculty members get more guidance on their work early on. For example, as part of an assistant professor's usual annual review, a senior faculty member in the same subfield reads the assistant professor's work and writes an evaluation. During their third-year review and their final tenure review, assistant professors propose faculty members to serve on their review committees. Junior professors are also encouraged to organize a conference around an unpublished manuscript. And senior scholars give assistant professors the names of experts outside the institution whom junior scholars can consult about their work. "For women, foreigners, or shy men, that sort of moment can be really important," says Ms. Bermeo. "Some people grab on their own, some people don't." Ms. Bermeo says she hopes the changes will help junior professors prepare better tenure cases. "I figure it's a very good investment in our own people." Ironically, the junior professor who served on the tenure-reform committee will not be among those people. Mr. Deneen, who came up for tenure this past year, was recommended by his department but rejected by the universitywide committee in March. "It is deeply frustrating and, I think, discouraging," he says, as he prepares to go on the job market. At age 28, Harvard's President Summers, an economics whiz, became one of the youngest professors to earn tenure there, so he agrees that it is shortsighted to force out promising young academics. He has been vocal on the campus about the need to hire and promote such scholars. Administrators hope that a review of the tenure system within the faculty of arts and sciences that was begun in 2002, after Mr. Summers became president, will soon bear fruit. "We want to make sure the process is as transparent as possible and as consistent as possible," says Vincent J. Tompkins, associate dean for academic affairs for the faculty of arts and sciences. To start with, Harvard's arts-and-sciences departments are changing the process by which outside scholars are asked to comment on candidates for a senior-faculty slot. Instead of sending a blind letter asking reviewers to rank a list of candidates, departments will now flag the name of a junior professor on the list who is being seriously considered for tenure. They will also provide copies of recent research or unpublished works by the professor. Mr. Tompkins says he hopes that will lead to more- informed judgments. When there is no internal candidate for a tenured faculty slot, the department will be asked to articulate how filling the slot with an external candidate would affect the future prospects of junior faculty members in the department. And when a scholar is promoted to associate professor without tenure, the usual process at Harvard, he or she will receive a progress letter explaining exactly how to further improve. This fall the tenure reforms will be incorporated into a revised copy of the faculty handbook, which for the first time in recent memory will be handed out to every faculty member. "We have an institutional interest in seeing outstanding people hired and departments doing an outstanding job of mentoring people," says Mr. Tompkins. Harvard's faculty of arts and sciences does not, however, plan to create a tenure track. At Yale, which is reviewing its tenure process, Charles H. Long, the deputy provost, hopes to convince junior faculty members that getting tenure from within is not as difficult as it may appear. "You put in a lot of time, you wait, and they may not even put you up," he says. "It really looks formidable." But he says the reality is that more than half the current faculty members have been promoted from the junior ranks. He estimates that about one-quarter to one-third of those who come to Yale as junior professors actually go on to earn tenure, which is more than the junior faculty might believe. At fault may be the complicated system by which tenured slots are made available at Yale. For example, departments must either wait for a senior-level retirement to create an opening, or they must combine two open junior lines, which aren't always available, to create a senior slot. That often leads department heads to use a shortage of open positions as an excuse for not giving tenure to junior professors, when the real reason is competency, Mr. Long says. Mr. Long also worries that because the review process is time consuming for colleagues at other institutions, they write less about an internal candidate because they think Yale already knows enough about him or her. He has suggested sending two kinds of letters. When there is a viable internal candidate, the letter, like Harvard's, would say that Yale is seriously considering promoting that person with tenure and ask that the candidate be compared with others in the field. That would give more than a perceived advantage to internal candidates, he believes. Already, he says, internal candidates who make it to the short list get the job 80 to 90 percent of the time. Such changes, if made, won't necessarily increase the success rate of internal candidates. And that is not necessarily the goal. In many ways, says Mr. Long, the system works wonderfully. "Having faculty turnover ... is a healthy part of an institution." But he hopes to make the process seem less daunting to those professors who are thinking of jumping ship. A report from the review committee is expected this fall. Other Ivy League colleges are looking at their tenure processes (see box). Columbia University is examining its system for the first time in about 15 years. Alan Brinkley, Columbia's provost, says faculty members and administrators will look at such weaknesses as how achingly slow the process is. That sluggishness is a result of separate, ad hoc universitywide committees having to be created for each tenure review. On the upside, says Mr. Brinkley, Columbia's process is seen as more egalitarian than those at Harvard, Princeton, or Yale. Mr. Brinkley, who was denied tenure at Harvard in the mid-1980s, says it was clear that there was no possibility of getting tenure at that time. "It was kind of liberating," he says. "You didn't have much at stake." At Columbia, he says, people arrive thinking they will get a legitimate shot at tenure if their work is good enough. "It has neither the liberating effect ... nor does it have the sense of arbitrariness." If It's Not Broke ... Not all professors believe tenure needs fixing at the top Ivies. Richard J. Gerrig, a professor of psycholinguistics at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, spent 10 years at Yale in the psychology department and was never put up for tenure. But like Mr. Stam, the Dartmouth political-science professor, Mr. Gerrig says he assumed going in that that would be the case. "I refuse to feel bad about the fact that I didn't get tenure at Yale," he says. "It worked out exactly how I expected. No one gave me false hope." He found helpful mentors among senior professors, who advised him on his book and on getting grants, says Mr. Gerrig. Like many assistant professors at the top three Ivies, he was granted two paid, yearlong research leaves. But he remembers other junior faculty members in the department who were bitter because they felt they had been misled. "I knew people who really and truly believed they were going to get tenure," says Mr. Gerrig. "It's hard to leave a job where you're happy." Mr. Wohlforth, the scholar who was denied tenure at Princeton in 1995, says that while there are certainly drawbacks to the tenure system, being an assistant professor at Princeton is nonetheless rewarding. Some of his friends outside Princeton had the impression that the university hired young scholars, worked them hard, then dropped them, he says. But he got two out of six years off for leave, taught a light load, and had incredible resources. "Come on, they're not exploiting you," he says. People who didn't stay, he adds, ended up getting good jobs elsewhere. Giving someone tenure at Princeton, argues Mr. Wohlforth, will always be an extraordinary gift. And it seems to have produced an excellent faculty. "I sort of can't blame them for being tough. You're handing out an unbelievable thing." TENURE AT THE IVIES The process of awarding tenure at Ivy League colleges varies from institution to institution. Some of them have no formal track to tenure, while the others do. And some of the institutions are reviewing their tenure processes or are planning to. Here is what is happening at each one:
SOURCE: Chronicle reporting
http://chronicle.com Section: The Faculty Volume 50, Issue 41, Page A10 | |||||||||||||||
Copyright © 2004 by The Chronicle of Higher Education