We Need Space

Another major obstacle to hiring more faculty is space constraints, which Knowles deemed the faculty's "largest challenge" in his letter.

This literal squeeze is most apparent in the psychology department in William James Hall, which Kosslyn says is bursting at the seams.

"New positions are targeted for us, and where do we put these people?" Schacter asks. "If you don't have anywhere to put them, you can't initiate the search. We had a net increase of one professor several years ago, but we've made limited use of it because of space constraints."

These needs are even more pressing in the hard sciences, where new professors need lab and research space that Knowles estimates at four to five thousand square feet.

Although the University has taken steps to alleviate this problem--the purchase of 50 acres in Allston, a plan to renovate the North Yard and the eventual takeover of the Inn at Harvard in 2013--FAS is unlikely to see any substantial increase in available space over the next few years.

But faculty and administrators alike stress that decade-long timeframes are the only ones that make sense for a meaningful increase in the size of the faculty, because the search process is so laborious. As Knowles wrote in his letter, "The faculty effort that goes into a search can be high, and this effort is frustrated when the offer is not accepted. Gone are the days when Harvard merely decided, and beckoned."

"We can only [increase faculty size] as quickly as departments make searches, read recommendations, write dossiers, send them to the academic deans, and send it to the president for ad hoc review," Fisher says. "All of this takes time; there's a very high level of scrutiny."