The Time Caps Working Group released a survey on the policy last week.
Photo illustration by Justin Morrison/Inside Higher Ed | APCortizasJr/iStock/Getty Images | Time Caps Working Group
In Harvard University’s undergraduate and Ph.D. programs, non-tenure-track teachers cannot earn contract renewals indefinitely; instead they are forced out after a set period of time. The Faculty of Arts and Sciences calls this the “eight-year rule.”
The rule says that non-tenure-track faculty—“including College Fellows, lecturers, preceptors [teachers of language or other special instruction] and teaching assistants”—can teach for a maximum of eight years, with few exceptions.
Sara Feldman, a Harvard preceptor who teaches Yiddish, described the policy as “cruel, destructive and frankly ridiculous.” She said her position “has been the joy of my life, and, at the same time, I’m limited in what I can do because I don’t have the opportunity to build past eight years.”
Every time a Yiddish instructor leaves, “the program has to be restarted from scratch,” said Feldman, who has now worked at Harvard for six years. “Everything that I do is going to be in the trash in a year and a half,” she said.
A Harvard spokesperson declined Friday to explain the university’s rationale for the policy, even as opposition to it has grown.
In the spring, Harvard’s non-tenure-track faculty formed a union—Harvard Academic Workers—which represents thousands of faculty. At the time, one organizing committee member said union leaders wanted to see an end to this “fundamentally arbitrary” cap.
The United Autoworkers–affiliated labor organization has since called on Harvard to end the practice. And because contract negotiations can take a while, the union wants Harvard to do so even before it agrees to its first contract with the university. Harvard administrators, however, have said they won’t deal with the issue outside the official collective bargaining process—and even then, they haven’t said they’ll concede.
The university acknowledges that its refusal could mean more faculty are pushed out while bargaining drags on for an undetermined period of time.
“We understand that during the negotiations of this first contract certain members of the bargaining unit may ‘time out’ under the current policies, but we do not see this as a compelling reason to suspend current rules or to deviate from maintaining the status quo while we negotiate our first contract,” officials said in a Sept. 27 letter to the union’s negotiating team. “Turnover within a unit during bargaining is not unusual.”
Last week, the Time Caps Working Group, an organization of non-tenure-track faculty and others, released the results of a survey showing that respondents “overwhelmingly” support ending the practice. The union and members of the group released the survey at a news conference and called for lifting the cap now.
“I have eight months left and then I will be fired,” said Lisa Gulesserian, who teaches Armenian language and culture. But the push to stop the policy isn’t just about saving the jobs of people like her, she said; the turnover harms students, who lose mentors and recommendation letter writers in addition to teachers. She argued that the university’s desire to address the issue only in collective bargaining ignores the fact that it is, fundamentally, an educational policy.
The Time Caps Working Group said no other Ivy League institution has such a policy, though others have pointed to similar, if less expansive, policies at Princeton and Yale.
“We’re not asking for tenure,” Gulesserian said. “What we’re asking for is renewable contracts based on department need and performance of the person in that position.”
Feldman added, “The families who send their children to Harvard, they wouldn’t accept this in a K-12 situation. And they shouldn’t accept this in higher education.”