Death Knell for the Delicate Experiment at HBS

This post is a follow up to my recent post On Not Getting Tenure.  In that post, I described my concerns about what is happening to HBS - in terms of the tenure process and its impact on the composition of the faculty and the focus of its research.  In particular, I am very concerned that HBS is falling prey to forces of academic orthodoxy that would render it increasingly irrelevant as a source of ideas that actually have an impact on business practice. 

Some new information has come to my attention about the HBS promotion process and Harvard President Summers' impact on it that, I think, sounds the death knell for the "delicate experiment" in bridging theory and practice at the school.

As you read what follows, I invite you to consider the following questions:
* If this is not a significant change, why is it happening?
* If it is a significant change, why is it necessary? What is the problem to which this is the answer?
* What incentives (which economists rightly believe are a major influence on behavior) does this create for junior faculty at HBS, in particular their incentives to make investments in insitituion-specific capital such as case writing, course development, and teaching?
* When were these changes implemented and were they applied to this year's tenure candidates?
* Critically - What role should HBS alumni have in influencing decisions that may significantly affect the school's brand equity?

Each year, HBS holds a series of meetings for non-tenured faculty in which the Dean and the Senior Associate Dean responsible for the promotions process reinforce the criteria for promotion, as laid out in HBS' "blue book" of promotions standards, and provide an overview of the process.  According to several people I talked to who attended, the latest meeting had quite a different character from previous ones.  Some good aspects, such as increasing openness about the stages of the process. 

But then a big shift was announced. 

[Interestingly, however, it apparently was not identified by the Dean as a change.  People in the meeting who had been at similiar meetings in previous years recognized it was a significant change, while some of those who hadn't been at a meeting in a prior year thought they were hearing about a long-standing process. If this is indeed the way it was presented, and I have it on good authority that its was, then strikes me as a bit odd that such a major shift can occur and not be explicitly labeled as such.  Of course doing so would raise difficult questions about the fairness of changing the rules when people have been relying on the original set for many years.]

HBS has now added two "outsiders" in critical roles in the process. One is a scholar from outside of Harvard, the other is a tenured faculty member from within Harvard but outside HBS.  I assume that this is the result of negotiations between the Dean of HBS and President Summers, and is a way for HBS to avoid becoming subject to the full-blown ad hoc process.  But the result will be just as damaging.  

Why?  First because the expert from outside Harvard is chosen to be an unimpeachable representative of the "field" in which the candidate for tenure is being evaluated.  After the candidate's internal subcommittee is established, the outside expert briefs them on the state of the field, which of course strongly frames the context in which the candidate is evaluatated.  Critically, it means that the candidate must be placed in a "field" that leading external scholars recognize as a legitimate and important one.  So much for interdisciplinary research.

Second, the person from within Harvard presumably is a product of, and supporter of, the "star" system that has made the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences such a difficult place in which to get tenured.  Will they push HBS in that direction?

These outsiders apparently sit in on key meetings between the Dean of HBS and President Summers.  It would be interesting to know if the field expert from outside Harvard plays a role in identifying key external players, which would mean they would influence who the subcommittee asks to write letters evaluating the candidate's contributions.  It also would be interesting to know the extent to which these people weigh in with their own opinions about the candidate's fitness to be tenured at Harvard, and what impact that will have.

My point: this arrangement places the outsiders in positions to have enormous influence on the process. 

In fact, it is not clear to me that there is a difference, in terms of impact and outcomes, between this and a full blown ad hoc process.  It may simply be a face-saving way for HBS to surrender substantial control over its tenure decisions.

There are also questions about exactly when this process began to be applied to HBS tenure cases.  I have it on good authority that what was described to me as a similar "quasi-ad hoc process" was applied to the first HBS tenure case after President Summers was appointed, that of Brian Hall in the NOM unit.  So there are important issues here, I think, about shifting standards and reliance on the part of junior faculty.

Now place yourself in the position of a young tenure track faculty member at HBS. As a rational actor playing a high stakes game, how would you respond to a realization that the rules of the game have changed in this way?  Would you (1) devote a lot of time to writing cases and practitioner-oriented articles, and developing course materials that outside scholars view as something lower than the lowest-class journal articles or (2) focus on identifying yourself stongly with a discipline, publishing in its journals, and cultivating its leading members?

Tough choice.  And the end of delicate experiment.

[Obviously I'm not privy to the whole story and would be interested in learning more.]

# Posted by Michael Watkins on 2/18/04; 6:12:41 AM - Comments [2] Trackback [5]