More on University Professorships
Posted on September 27th, 2010 in Uncategorized | 5 Comments »
Some posts generate far more discussion than I expect to—such as the one on university professorships below, which currently has 35 comments.
There’s clearly a fair amount of confusion about the terms of such arrangements.
Which reinforces a point I was trying to make: The return of Larry Summers to Harvard provides a great hook for the Crimson to conduct an in-depth look at university professorships.
One final point about Summers’ return: There’s been much debate about whether he had to return to Harvard or lose his professorship. My hunch is that something would have been worked out if he’d come back after three or four years. Does anyone really believe that, with Bob Rubin and Drew Faust on the Corporation, Harvard would say no to Summers?
5 Responses
9/27/2010 9:10 am
The 35-comment thread on University Professorships was mainly about how long a professor may stay away and whether in certain cases a deal was made ahead of time about the possibility of his or her return to Harvard at a later time.
There was another interesting aspect to the conversation, though. It had to do with the fact that some countries still have a mandatory retirement age for professors. So you can go away and teach at Cambridge, but when you hit the retirement age there, you can return and teach for several more years at Harvard.
Here comes my question. I heard recently that outside evaluations by retired professors no longer count in the tenuring process at Harvard. Evidently, we are no longer permitted to solicit “blind letters” from emeriti. If that’s true, it seems odd to me that, for example, a 66-year-old professor who had to retire from his position at an overseas university should be regarded as a less valuable evaluator than a 70-year-old professor who is still teaching in the US. The argument for eliminating emeriti from the blind letter lists is, I was told, that a retired professor is less in touch with what’s going on in the field. But does that argument really stand up to scrutiny? I’ve seen retired professors overseas who are still very much part of the university community. I’ve had lively conversations with them about developments in the field. It surely isn’t the case that turning 65 automatically makes a person an old dodderer. So is there any justification for this new stance by the Harvard administration?
9/27/2010 11:49 am
These are two of the questions re UPs that The Crimson should look at if they do a story.
1. Why are some donors of named UPs (currently held positions) been allowed to contribute no money, or only a small amount of money, toward the professorship until sometime in the future, perhaps in some cases, only after their deaths?
2. Why are some donors given huge discounts on the amount of money that they have to put up (in total) for a named UP?
9/27/2010 8:37 pm
Aren’t there some provisions for people to bequeath money to Harvard, but delay giving the bulk of the money while they and /or their spouse still needs it to live on? I basically thought that such provisions would also be the basis for giving toward University Professorships. Please correct me if I’m wrong about this.
9/28/2010 6:11 am
The rule used to be that (for obvious reasons) you couldn’t get your name on a chair until all the cash was in. Sam is right that this was not observed in the case of at least one University Professorship. I don’t know how widespread the practice is, nor do I know anything about the price differentials Sam mentions.
9/28/2010 9:30 pm
Interesting article on HMC. A number of mistakes in the article, but it gives a very good picture of what is going on.
http://noir.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=aqEvfk0usksA&pos=12
Speaking of the endowment. Wasn’t it premature to increase the payout. I know some will not agree, but when I look at Harvard and particularly Yale, there is trouble brewing if markets don’t continue to go up.
Didn’t we have this discussion here a mere four years ago?