Magna Charta

Two years ago Harvard's dismissal of two popular, liberal young instructors, John Raymond Walsh and Alan R. Sweezy, ruffled the leaves of the academic grove but uprooted no trees. When Harvard's President James Bryant Conant, petitioned by the faculty, appointed a faculty committee (including Felix Frankfurter) to investigate the affair, few expected anything to come of it. For Messrs. Walsh and Sweezy, nothing did; President Conant politely turned down the committee's recommendation that the pair be rehired (TIME, June 13).

But the committee went on to investigate the hiring and firing of Harvard teachers generally. Two months ago it delivered a 165-page report proposing many reforms. Last week, to the surprise of many, President Conant adopted the report in toto as Harvard's employment policy. The Walsh-Sweezy affair thus produced what may well prove a Magna Charta for U. S. college teachers.

To laymen all college teachers are professors, but the college hierarchy has many orders--assistants, fellows, lecturers, instructors, assistant professors, associate professors, full professors. Associate and full professors usually have permanent tenure, get good salaries, vote on college policies. But professorships are few, and lower jobs are ill-paid and precarious.

Harvard has 16 categories of teachers. President Conant's committee found that only one beginning instructor in 20 gets permanent appointment as an associate or full professor. Average time for the journey: 16 years; average age on arrival: 39. The committee proposed that the number of teachers' categories be reduced from 16 to six (including visiting lecturers), that the trial period be cut from 16 to eight years. Salaries, now varying widely in each category, will be made uniform: $1,200 for teaching fellows (graduate students); $2,500 for annual instructors; $2,750 to $3,300 (rising by five annual increments) for faculty instructors; $4,000 to $7,000 for associate professors; $8,000 to $12,000 (according to merit) for full professors.

Most ringing manifesto in President Conant's Magna Charta is one on academic freedom. Finding traces of anti-Semitism among the faculty, President Conant and his committee sternly directed that appointments be made "solely on grounds of professional qualifications." Because "a university breeds its own conservatism," they agreed that Harvard should go out of its way to recruit "thoughtful rebels" for its faculty.

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