Susanna Siegel (philosophy of mind and language) has been awarded tenure by Harvard University. In addition, the University has approved a tenured offer to Sean Kelly (philosophy of mind, phenomenology), who last year was turned down for tenure at Princeton University. These decisions are striking in two ways.
First, it's clearly time to stop saying that "no one gets tenure at Harvard," which used to be (almost always) the case during the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. In fact, the last four young philosophers to come up for tenure in the Harvard Philosophy Department in the last half-dozen years--Richard Heck (who has since left for Brown), James Pryor (who left for Princeton, and then NYU), Alison Simmons, and now Susanna Siegel--have all received tenure, a rate of tenure far higher than Princeton's, or any other top department's in recent memory. The era in which Harvard (or Princeton) could expect to appoint the top established senior faculty from elsewhere is clearly over, and Harvard Philosophy, at least, now plainly recognizes the need to promote its best junior faculty.
Second, the tenured offer to Kelly, after the unfavorable decision by Princeton, provides some evidence for my contention that the field of philosophy is increasingly fractured in the U.S. A generation ago it would have been unimaginable (am I wrong?) that Princeton's tenure reject would receive a tenured offer from Harvard, or vice versa. (The list of distinguished philosophers turned down for tenure at Princeton and Harvard is, of course, long, but in all the other cases of which I'm aware many years elapsed before the philosophers in question ended up in peer departments.) That this now happens reflects the fact that views about what work is important and high quality are now more divergent in philosophy than they were a generation ago.
I should add that I purport only to be reporting sociological facts about the profession. My personal view is that it's not a bad thing for there to be this kind of "fracturing" of judgments of quality and importance, since they are still within the space of reasonable disagreements, or so it seems to me. That Harvard, the Department of Quine, should now step forward to commit a tenured line to a young philosopher conversant in phenomenology is as clear an indication one could imagine that times have changed in American philosophy.
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