Word: professorship
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...better would be a plan of advancement based on two standards. The first would be a man's ability as a teacher and as a scholar; the second, the current teaching needs of the university. If these criteria are used it means the creation of an additional associate professorship whenever needed. Such a system of promotion does not necessarily imply a large block of frozen professors, but it does mean that the administration has an open mind regarding their possible...
...evident, there is. The University may seek to assure itself only that it is going to be able to pay the prospective appointee his salary as an associate professor, leaving to the future the question of whether it either can or wants to appoint him to a full professorship. On financial grounds there would appear to be little to choose between the two policies. The choice, essentially, is an educational...
...Between receipt of an associate professorship and retirement men die. They inherit money. They get tired. Or they are offered more attractive positions elsewhere.... Whenever under the new policy an intrinsically desirable teacher is turned out of Harvard and thereafter (within "the next five or ten years") a permanent appointee in his Department ceases to teach prior to retirement, the University will have been unnecessarily damaged.... But the present policy results in automatic dismissal of actual teachers of known value in favor of hypothetical teachers of unknowable value. Surely it is possible to frame a policy less blind and accidental...
...What is in question is solely the appointment of a larger number of associate professors to compete as equals, over a period of years, for a lesser number of full professorships. Under such a policy, no one would be tagged as destined from the outset to be given a full professorship, and none need be tagged as destined to be denied it. Under such a policy, disappointments when they come would be gradual, and would be founded at least on permanence rather than prediction. We cannot believe that the avoidance of such disappointments ought to be the lodestar...
...scheme helps Government while hurting other departments, by diverting funds from them. Moreover, if given the two posts he would probably select men of his own age group, "stars" who have already earned academic fame. These he could lure from other universities by the offer of a Harvard professorship...