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Standards for Tenure

As one of the top mathematics departments in the nation, if not in the world, Berkeley has extremely high standards. Considering that hires in recent years have included Fields Medalists William Thurston and Vaughan Jones, one might think that Harrison didn't stand a chance. But if such ``superstars'' set the standard for tenure, the faculty of around sixty full professors would dwindle down to a small handful. Berkeley hires some, like Thurston and Jones, with tenure, but it also hires lesser-known but promising assistant professors and promotes them through the ranks. Harrison is the first assistant professor to have been denied tenure in approximately the past twenty-five years.

Harrison has said that her work compared well with that of eight so-called ``comparables''--the men who were promoted from assistant to associate or full professor between 1978 and 1988. (Not considered a ``comparable'' is Marina Ratner, the one woman promoted to tenure in that period.) Who got tenure at what time is public knowledge, so it would be a simple matter to check who these individuals are. However, their names have been left out of press accounts and other writings about the Harrison case out of a feeling that these individuals are innocent bystanders to the controversy and it would be unfair to drag them into the fray. Harrison, who obtained their tenure files through a court action, has said that her qualifications place her squarely in the middle of this group.

In an article prepared after Harrison was appointed to the faculty this summer,⁶ Berkeley faculty member Robion Kirby argues that the standard relevant in the Harrison case is set by the group to whom Berkeley has made offers in geometry/topology. (He explains that for some purposes the department divides itself into five fields: algebra, analysis, applied mathematics, logic, and geometry/topology. Some faculty belong to more than one field.) Between 1972 and 1991, Berkeley made twelve offers for tenured and tenure-track positions in geometry/topology. The list of offers is indeed impressive, with Fields Medalists S.-T. Yau, William Thurston, and Michael Freedman, as well as others, such as I. M. Singer, generally considered to be of equal standing. Kirby also says that there are at least a dozen other geometers of equal quality to those on his list, including some women, to whom offers would have been made had they expressed sufficient interest.

Which ``list''--Harrison's or Kirby's--is more relevant to the Harrison case? The basic yardstick for making tenure decisions at Berkeley is an assessment by experts in the field of the quality of the candidate's work, as well as comparisons to others in the field who are at a similar stage in their careers. Letters that solicit recommendations for tenure decisions often explicitly ask for such comparisons. Harrison's list of ``comparables'' does not really capture the process of tenure review at Berkeley because, although past tenure decisions do establish a general level of quality that tenure candidates must meet, the review does not include a systematic comparison of the candidate's tenure file with the files of those who have gained tenure in the past. This is in part because doing so would involve comparing the candidate to current faculty members, and in part because making comparisons across fields is extremely difficult.

On the other hand, one might say that Kirby's list amounts to asking, when a candidate comes up for tenure, whether there is anyone better out there whom Berkeley could hire; this is not part of the usual tenure review process either. Given that in a tenure review a candidate is compared with others in the field, one might conclude that Kirby's list is more relevant than Harrison's. However, Harrison says that Kirby erred in placing her in geometry/topology; she says she is in analysis. In addition, many of the people on Kirby's list are more senior than Harrison, and most received offers at the full professor level. One of the reasons why Kirby's and Harrison's lists give different pictures is that Harrison is focusing on the tenure review, while Kirby (who believes Harrison should not have been hired as an assistant professor in the first place) is focusing on hiring. The main significance of Harrison's list of ``comparables'' is that their tenure files would have formed the core evidence in a court trial. To prove discrimination, Harrision would have had to demonstrate that she was at least as strong as the weakest among the ``comparables''.

Some in the department contend that the reason Harrison was denied tenure was that her work simply wasn't good enough. ``On purely mathematical grounds, it's a 100% reasonable decision,'' says Kirby. ``There's no way in the world that there should be claims of sexism in this case.'' In his article, Kirby says that the letters of recommendation for Harrison's tenure struck him as ``on the whole, unremarkable, and clearly below the kind of letters I expect for a positive tenure vote.'' Although Kirby believes Harrison has done some good work, he says that she had not accomplished enough by the time of her tenure review. He says that opinions about her work both within the department and outside it were divided and concludes, ``such divided opinion is a long, long way from what it takes [to get tenure] at Berkeley.'' Berkeley faculty member Marina Ratner states it more bluntly: ``Her case was absolutely, clearly below all other cases considered by the department that I observed.''

Neither Harrison nor her supporters paint her as a world-class genius; they say she is a good, solid mathematician of Berkeley caliber, and they acknowledge that hers was not the strongest case for tenure that Berkeley has seen. What happened, Harrison has said, was that in the cases of the men who were granted tenure, their strengths were emphasized and weaknesses downplayed, while she was given the opposite treatment: her strengths were downplayed and her weaknesses emphasized. In addition, Harrison has said that reviewers who knew her work well supported her and that those who were against her were unfamiliar with it. According to Morris Hirsch, her strongest supporter in the department, ``I think that if she had been a man, her case would have been prepared differently, a different case would have been presented to the department.'' He says that even though sometimes doubts are expressed about the qualifications of male candidates, ``it's sort of shoulder-to-shoulder $\ldots$ there's hardly ever an important split in the department.'' But if a woman is perceived as being ``not world class [then] all these doubts come out'', and she is treated very differently from men with similar qualifications.

The diverging opinions about the Harrison case point to the broader issue of how much tenure reviews involve subjective matters of taste and opinion. Dorothy Wallace, now a faculty member at Dartmouth College, spent some time at Berkeley as a visiting professor in the early 1980s. Although she does not have an opinion on the Harrison case, she believes the process of tenure review can be quite subjective. ``We faculty members are asked to look at a candidate's file in comparison with other young mathematicians we know in similar situations,'' she comments. ``We might be comparing the person with people who got tenure at Harvard, or were denied tenure at Harvard or who received or were denied tenure at Penn State, or whatever collection of mathematicians leaps to mind. We are not asked for any justification of our choice of pool. We are expected to be able to say that the candidate is at least as good as any of the people to whom we are comparing her (or him). We are never asked to justify this judgment, in fact we are never asked to define what constitutes `good' or `as good as' $\ldots$ I am driving at the fact that the process itself is wide open to any sort of individual or group prejudice that could possibly exist.''

Next: Charges of Discrimination Up: Fighting for Tenure The Previous: A Position at Oxford