NFI 2013 - Introduction
JUDITH D. SINGER: It is my pleasure to welcome you to this year's new faculty Institute. This is actually the sixth year that we have been bringing together new faculty from across Harvard University for a chance to both meet each other and to hear from colleagues from across the university about what it's like to be a faculty member at Harvard, some thoughts about how to spend your first year here and your future years here, and also just the sense of building community. This year for the first time we're doing this at the second part of the day and decided to invite your colleagues from across the university to a reception afterwards in Boylston Hall. So we'll have a party afterwards. We thought that was better than providing you with breakfast.
And I will say a few words, and I'm going to introduce Alan Garber, our provost. The few words I want to say is, I remember being a new faculty member at Harvard. I actually had finished my PhD in the statistics department here, and started in 1984 as an assistant professor at the Graduate School of Education. There was no orientation. You were sent to the HR office to sign your health insurance forms, and that was it. And the next day you started teaching and had no sense of what it is that you have gotten yourself into.
Over the years the university has really tried to make an effort to change the experience of new faculty, and in particular for many of you, new ladder faculty, so that we are welcoming you to this community and providing you with the supports that can succeed. I will say when I started, I was an assistant professor and told, assume you won't get tenure. There was no tenure track at the university. The university has really changed now and we want to provide a supportive environment for you as individuals, as teachers, and as scholars, and help you balance those kinds of commitments in a way that fulfills you and helps you get a reputation here at Harvard and a reputation in the wider world for having an impact in the world.
And all of us want to have an impact. We do it in different ways if we're in different professional schools. We do it in different ways if we're in Faculty of Arts and Sciences. But we are all committed to having that kind of impact in our fields. And we want to make that possible.
I just want to say one or two words about Harvard to give you some context, and then introduce Alan. Harvard is huge. In fact, it's so large that basically if you took the whole Harvard community, they'd exceed the size of Fenway Park, so just to give you a sense of that. There are actually 10,000 faculty at Harvard. A large number of them at Harvard Medical School. Those are the docs you want to see if you're sick. There are also about 1,500 ladder faculty, assistant, associate, and full professors in the rest of the university. About 2/3 of them are tenured. About 1/3 are in the assistant and associate professor ranks.
I'm pleased to say we, every year, get a little bit more diverse than we were the year before. We're up to just over a quarter women at the assistant and associate professor level. It's just about a third women. And just under 20% are members of a minority group. So it's a different Harvard from the Harvard of years past.
But one of the things about Harvard that makes this kind of event so important is it's famous tub system, so every tub on its own bottom. Each school at Harvard pretty much operates within its own universe. And many of you have gotten orientations within your schools to get a sense of what it's like at the School of Public Health, in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, in the Graduate School of Design, et cetera. But without these kinds of events that the provost's office is committed to doing, you could go years here without meeting somebody from another part of the university. And we think that it's particularly important to build those kinds of interfaculty collaboration and connections, both for purely social purposes-- that's why we're throwing a party at the end of the day-- but also as importantly for the kinds of rich intellectual contributions and connections that you can make.
And so what I hope you'll hear today from our panelists is a sense of both how to negotiate your new roles at Harvard within your individual schools, but how to also think of yourselves as citizens of the university. We want very much in the provost's office to encourage each and every one of you to feel that you're not just a faculty member at Harvard Business School or Harvard Medical School, you are a faculty member at Harvard University. And the opportunities that makes available to you are things that we really want to facilitate. And we'll be making additional comments about those kinds of themes during the day. But I just want to sort of set that as a theme for why we're gathered today to have this pan university event.
With that, I'm going to introduce our provost, Alan Garber, sitting over here. Wave. Alan is the Provost of Harvard University. He is now in his third year. So I think he's in his junior year of being provost is the way of thinking about it. He is a product of Harvard University in terms of having been an undergraduate here and getting a graduate degree. He is an MD-PhD whose work focuses on health care policy. These days he spends most of his time, as do I, in meetings. So I think for Alan, this is a pleasure to meet the new faculty of Harvard University. And please join me in welcoming Alan. And after Alan speaks, we'll have a chance to go around the room and introduce ourselves. His schedule is incredibly tight. So thank you Alan.
[APPLAUSE]
ALAN GARBER: Thank you Judy. After Judy's welcome to you, I don't have a whole lot to add, because I think the most important message is what she said about what we routinely call One Harvard. Every one of you, whether you came here-- whether you're here now as an assistant professor, an associate professor, or a full professor, is someone very, very special, and someone who is here because of great promise and great accomplishment that you've already demonstrated. And the saddest thing from my perspective that could occur in your time here is if you don't take advantage of the many kinds of resources that the university has to offer outside your own immediate environment.
And particularly for those of you who are junior, there will be a lot of pressure for you to publish in your field, to teach in your field, and to focus, focus, focus. Now in terms of navigating scholarship, scholarly life at Harvard, I'm not an expert because I spent my entire career as a faculty member at Stanford, not here. And I'm going to give you my perspective, which I hope you will not write down and keep confidential, because most of your mentors would say this is the wrong advice.
JUDITH D. SINGER: You're being videoed and on the web later.
ALAN GARBER: OK, moving on. I think what you should focus on is the long term and what your long term goals are, and don't constantly think of just the next paper, the next milestone you need to reach. And the greatest mistake that I have seen junior faculty make is to try to more or less optimize chances for tenure. Now, there's nothing wrong with optimizing your chances for tenure. But many people when they're thinking about optimizing their chance for tenure are thinking in terms of very short term kinds of things. And that can push them to choose projects that are not sufficiently ambitious, to publications that are easy rather than ones that will be long shots.
Now clearly you don't want to engage in research that will have its first results in 10 years as your sole approach as a junior faculty member. But many more junior faculty that I have seen make the error of looking at trying to optimize very short term goals rather than long term goals. So I just want to urge you not to feel boxed in into dealing with these very short term goals. Don't ignore the reasons why you went into academia in the first place.
Now as part of the long term goals, you are in an environment that is unbelievably rich in not only the talent of its faculty in each area, but also the breadth of those talents. And we are bigger than our peer institutions. And that's even if you don't count the medical school, by the way. We have very large professional schools where very serious research goes on all the time, in addition to the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. And there are just huge opportunities for collaboration, but it takes a little bit of extra effort to get to know the people with whom you might work.
And as Judy was saying, the events that she and her office put on, like this one, are extremely important as a way for you to get to know people in the rest of the university. Because if it weren't for events like these, it would be very difficult for you to meet people. You can meet them at some big events but not carry on sustained conversations usually. So our goal actually is to make sure that you get to know people from around the university and maybe form something of a support group, because especially for the junior faculty, many of you will be going through parallel experiences. And it's great to have other people to speak to about that.
But the strength of this university is really in the diversity of its intellectual interests as well as the excellence in each area. And Judy, by the way, said that there are 10,000 medical faculty. And she's referring to the full time faculty. If you count all the medical school faculty, there are 12,000.
And we have such an abundance of riches here. We don't always come up with a consistent count of the number of libraries. So the official number is 73. And you're in one of the more prominent of them, and you're next to the largest of them in Widener. But in fact, if you count some of the libraries like some of the departmental libraries, it's actually more than 73. There is no shortage of resources of almost any kind here. And a big part of your experience as a new faculty member at Harvard is to learn exactly what those resources are and how to find them. And Judy's office is there to help with some parts of this, but a lot of this will come from conversations with your colleagues.
So let me just say that I'm very delighted that you chose to come to Harvard. You have a very bright future here. There is a tenure track, for those of you who are junior faculty, which was not true in the past. But it's very much the case today. And I think that at whatever level you come, you will find that you have an enormous set of resources in your colleagues.
And I, by the way, didn't even mention the students, but students here in every area are utterly spectacular. And if you feel comfortable in your mastery of your subject, you are about to be challenged in a way that doesn't happen quite the same way elsewhere. So they are stimulating, invigorating, challenging, and they will be a huge part of what gives you satisfaction about being at this institution.
So thank you. Do we have time, few questions?