You have undoubtedly heard that Harvard recently lost Cornel West after, as he has described, it disrespected him again. The same week, with rather less publicity, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences reaffirmed its misguided system of regularly discarding teaching faculty, the scholars who do Harvard’s most crucial pedagogical work yet are given no path to continued employment, no matter how excellently we perform our jobs.
Harvard is a place of hierarchies. Below its president and Washington-lobbying administrators, below its many deans with their hands on the levers of the university’s budgets and policies, below its tenured professors with their job security and research budgets, and below its celebrity faculty like West with ready access to public platforms, stretches a vast but often invisible stratum of lecturers and preceptors, the recent Ph.D.s who do much of the work of teaching Harvard’s undergraduates.
I teach in Harvard’s Writing Program, where for 150 years students have been required to take a small, discussion-based seminar, submitting drafts and revisions of essays for detailed feedback. Tenure-track faculty would never teach such courses; doing so while maintaining their research profiles would be impossible. Every year, my colleagues and I each have hundreds of individual meetings with our students and write a book’s worth of comments on their papers — more in one year than many ladder faculty have written in a decade, I would bet. Thus, we improve first-year students’ writing while also guarding the research time of professors. Elsewhere at Harvard, preceptors lead language classes and labs, and lecturers teach small tutorials and required sections in concentrations like history and literature and social studies.
Despite the crucial nature of this work, Harvard views us as utterly disposable. After at most eight years, we are unceremoniously barred from further teaching. In the past, most preceptors and lecturers moved on after a few years to their own professorships at other institutions. But after the 2008 recession and then the pandemic — and with the shrinking of college-age cohorts on the horizon — the academic-job market has collapsed and will probably never recover. At our end-of-year parties, the Writing Program raises a toast to our departing colleagues. In recent years, they are forced to leave but have nowhere to go. They are left behind, without health insurance or any other benefits, to piece together a schedule of classes on Boston’s adjunct market or to start an entirely new career. Not the best context for a celebration of their years of hard work.
When it became clear how thoroughly the pandemic would affect the academic world, Harvard extended the contracts of most ladder faculty by a year. Petitioned by over a thousand people to offer the same extension to teaching faculty, whose lives and careers were equally disrupted, administration did not deign to respond.
Harvard claims that it must cycle through new teaching faculty to keep up with changing academic disciplines, evolving student interests, and new pedagogical developments. It could, of course, assess us to see whether we continue to meet these needs. Instead it assumes ahead of time that we have stopped paying attention both to the fields we study and to our students. It could subject our teaching to rigorous review before granting us renewable contracts, in the same way that it reviews professors’ research before granting them tenure. This is what it would mean for Harvard to take itself seriously as a teaching institution. Instead it simply assumes we are doing a good job — but it doesn’t really check, because we won’t be around for long anyway.
Every year, I have to explain to my students, when they ask for letters of recommendation, that no one at Harvard cares about my opinion. I am happy to support them, and do when I am their best option since they have so few opportunities to interact with professors in large classes, but my word carries little weight. Every year, I have to explain to my students, when they invite me to dinner, that, unlike their professors, I cannot possibly make a career at Harvard. Eight years sounds like an eternity to a new college student, but I will still have decades of groceries to buy and mortgage payments to make after my appointment expires.
Rather than identifying which teaching faculty are excellent enough to be retained or even promoted, Harvard expends significant resources each year to find and train their replacements. It replaces not just those few who manage to find professorships elsewhere, not just those who have proven poor fits, but also those who its own Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning has given awards, those who, despite their exhausting teaching responsibilities, have published award-winning books, and even those who department and program heads have identified as irreplaceable. At the end of the cycle, Harvard will have invested a great deal in new teaching faculty who will, at best, finally resemble those they have replaced — only to jettison them too, rather than make use of their fully developed talents.
Is Harvard so obsessed with appearing selective that it will do anything lest its teaching faculty be confused for tenured professors?
Why does Harvard want so badly to do away with us? The reasons it provides are so specious and incoherent that I can only speculate. Is Harvard so petty, despite its vast endowment, despite the pittance it pays us compared to tenured faculty, that it wants to constantly reset the salaries of teaching faculty? As evidence for this, I would note that it pays us significantly less than Princeton and Stanford, which have similar kinds of writing programs.
Or is it those hierarchies? Is Harvard so obsessed with appearing selective that it will do anything lest its teaching faculty be confused for tenured professors, the chosen few deemed worthy to make a life at the institution? Harvard didn’t want to keep even West enough to do so, and it denied tenure to Lorgia García Peña. Some departments infamously almost never tenure their own junior hires. All of this turnover leaves Harvard less functional, as students have no stable mentors.
It is sometimes said that Harvard is really a hedge fund that happens to maintain an educational wing. But even the educational wing doesn’t value teaching, as is demonstrated by its disrespectful treatment of the faculty it hires specifically for their pedagogical promise. Harvard claims that “many of the functions held by non-ladder faculty are highly demanding and require regeneration.” It all but admits that it is exploiting us, burning through our teaching energy and good will, because it can discard us, replacing us with the next generation of eager new Ph.D.s who will keep it running.
