Document 23
December 5, 1997
Loeb House
President Neil L. Rudenstine (Chair)
Office of the President
Massachusetts Hall
Harvard University
Cambridge, MA 02138
Dr. Harvey V. Fineberg
Office of the Provost
Massachusetts Hall
Harvard University
Cambridge, MA 02138
Judith Richards Hope, Esq.
Paul, Hastings, Janofsky & Walker
1299 Pennsylvania Ave., N.W., 10th Floor
Washington, D.C. 20004
Mr. Stephen B. Kay
Goldman, Sachs & Co.
Oliver Street Tower, Suite 1700
125 High Street
Boston, MA 02110-2704
Professor Hanna H. Gray
University of Chicago
Department of History
1126 East 59th Street
Chicago, IL 60637
Ms. Sharon Gagnon
7001 Tree Top Circle
Anchorage, AK 99516
Dear Mr. Chairman and Members of the Joint Committee on Appointments:
In February of 1997, after a comprehensive eight month review process, the Government Department voted to recommend that Peter Berkowitz be promoted to Full Professor and be granted tenure. In April, 1997, President Rudenstine rejected the Department's recommendation and denied Berkowitz tenure.
This law firm has been retained to represent Professor Berkowitz. After careful review of Harvard's tenure review guidelines, including those related to the process of Ad Hoc Committee review and Presidential approval, it is my judgment that a number of critical procedures designed to assure fairness were disregarded. On behalf of Professor Berkowitz, I hereby request that the Joint Committee on Appointments review President Rudenstine's process and decision making. I believe that a fair and objective review by the Joint Committee will result in setting aside the President's decision and establishing an unbiased process to reconsider the tenure decision.
In 1990, Peter Berkowitz joined the government department at Harvard as an assistant professor. Since arriving, he has published a widely-reviewed, prize-winning book, Nietzsche: The Ethics of an Immoralist (Harvard University Press, 1995); completed a second book on a quite different subject, Virtue and the Making of Modern Liberalism (forthcoming, Princeton University Press, 1998), which received glowing reviews from scholarly referees at Harvard Press and Princeton Press; published more than 200 hundred pages of articles, essays, and reviews on a broad spectrum of issues, in many cases taking on the leading figures in his field, in scholarly journals such as The Review of Politics and The Yale Law Journal as well as in national opinion magazines such as The New Republic and The Public Interest; taught an unusually wide range of undergraduate and graduate courses, earned consistently high marks from student evaluations, and received awards from both Harvard and the American Political Science Association for excellence in teaching. Moreover, during this time, he may have sat on more dissertation committees than any other member of the junior faculty.
The procedures applied at the Ad Hoc and Presidential Review violated fundamental due process and require your careful scrutiny:
Given these facts, the stated purpose of the Committee's membership and review process "to assure that the University takes the broadest possible view of opportunities to recruit the ablest people and to make certain that nominees are judged strictly on their merits as scientists, scholars and teachers" has surely been violated.
Both Professor Berkowitz and I welcome the opportunity for a further dialogue with you. We feel certain that upon close inspection, you will agree that the process was unfairly biased against Professor Berkowitz and his work and emphasized his philosophical and political differences with some of his colleagues and was not consistent with the letter and spirit of Harvard's tenure review guidelines.
We therefore call upon the Joint Committee on Appointments to review the tenure review process and decision, and after review, set aside the decision and establish a fair process for reconsidering the matter.
| Very truly yours, Matthew H. Feinberg |