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...presidential stamp of approval—which rarely went against the faculty’s vote. Under the new system—which is in line with the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and Kennedy School of Government tenure processes—Summers will now appoint an ad hoc committee to review each case brought for tenure review. This committee, also chaired by Summers, will include experts from outside HLS who can objectively judge a candidate’s qualifications. If approved by the committee, the candidate will be brought to a vote by the HLS faculty...
...inserting himself into the tenure selection process before the faculty has its say, Summers could potentially skew the selection of new tenured professors. That Summers now has the power to choose the ad hoc committee members while simultaneously chairing such a committee is a dubious change indeed...
...addition of the ad hoc committee to the selection process should help HLS make appropriate decisions about whom to select for tenure. Although faculty from within a school are often the most qualified to determine how cohesively candidates will work with existing Faculty and the student body, the selection of tenure without any outside judges can make the tenure process dangerously biased. Too often, the insular world of academia breeds a faculty that “self-reproduces” in only offering tenure to a certain type of professor favored by the faculty. Broadening the initial round of selection...
Despite the benefit of direct outside opinion, the new committees may also give Summers undue influence on the selection of Faculty—potentially undermining the autonomy of HLS. Ideally, the qualifications for tenure should be made public, and the ad hoc committees should better clarify and make transparent the overall process so that candidates can rest assured that they are being treated fairly by the system. But the tenure process is highly secretive and likely to remain that way. Through micro-management—and possibly mismanagement—Summers could potentially prevent candidates he personally dislikes from getting...
Fried lauded the introduction of ad hoc committees “as long as they don’t make the whole process too cumbersome so that it takes too long to get anything done...