Dissent: The times for time caps are over | Opinion

Imagine: It’s your first day at work, but you already know exactly when you’ll be fired, regardless of your performance.

For many academic staff at Harvard—our faculty, lecturers, and fellows—this is the norm. Time limits at universities mean that termination dates are written into their employment contracts and enforced, no matter how much students love them or the toll of uprooting their lives and families to find work elsewhere.

The duration can be chosen completely freely: depending on the position, two, three or eight years. They are igniting burnout in an already daunting and stressful academic market and requiring prudent faculty to immediately look for a new job while assuming all the responsibilities of their current position.

And these expiration dates harm students whose relationship building with mentors is interrupted by administrative authority.

The editorial team acknowledges almost all of these shortcomings – which is why it is so ridiculous that they advocate only a slight softening of the status quo.

Your suggestion? Maintain time limits for most academic staff, except for faculty who are, well, exceptional performers. The current “kick-to-the-curb” policy ensures that new talent keeps coming in, they say. Newer is better.

This logic is exactly the opposite. In what other professional context would we say that the people with the most experience in a job are actually the least qualified for it? The proposal is particularly strange because these academic positions are already held by only a tiny fraction of elite applicants.

Furthermore, it is hard to imagine that a rotating group of overworked faculty with little familiarity with the university could be the best group to provide quality teaching or advising.

What’s remarkable is that these academic staff are making it. They shine as teachers, researchers, and mentors, despite the time constraints that keep them from valuable, student-related work and turn instead to job interviews and resumes.

Still, let’s imagine that the board is right—that the policy actually improves instruction. The argument for keeping it goes something like this: Time limits make life better for Harvard students. This is why time limits are good.

That’s true – if students are the only people worth caring about.

Obviously they aren’t. It’s about livelihood and Job security for underpaid, overworked people Faculty without tenure track. The best the board offers them is the promise that a lucky few can avoid unemployment – as long as they can outperform all of their future former colleagues.

The true purpose of time caps is clear: reducing costs. It’s easier to offer meager pay and benefits to employees who have been out of college for more than a few years. And if they burn out by the time they leave, contractually speaking, that’s no longer Harvard’s problem.

So instead of adopting a new, slightly more palatable time limit system, as the board is proposing, the university should simply eliminate it altogether and instead provide presumptive renewal for faculty who meet performance standards.

This approach works well for non-tenure-track academics at Rutgers University and the University of Michigan. Some faculty at Harvard Medical School and the TH Chan School of Public Health also enjoy the opportunity for permanent employment.

Every single person on the Editorial Board benefits from the work of the scientific staff. It’s a shame the board refuses to reciprocate.

Saul IM Arnow ’26, associate editorial editor, is a social studies specialist at Adams House. E. Matteo Diaz ’27, a Crimson editorial comp director, lives in Leverett House. Jasmine N. Wynn, editor at Crimson Editorial, lives in Winthrop House. Nuriel R. Vera-DeGraff ’26, editor at Crimson Editorial, is a social studies and mathematics double major in Mather House.

Differing Opinions: Occasionally the Crimson editorial board may disagree about the opinions we express in an editorial. In these cases, dissenting board members have the opportunity to express their opposition to staff opinions