Thanks to Milton Friedman’s filing habits, we are able to catch a glimpse into the tenure and promotion process at Harvard for the case of James S. Duesenberry in 1952. Friedman was invited to serve on the ad hoc committee to review the case for promoting Duesenberry from assistant professor to associate professor of economics with tenure in Harvard’s economics department. A typed copy of the department’s two-page recommendation submitted by the chairman Arthur Smithies, a one page c.v. for Duesenberry, and additional letters of support by Wassily Leontief and Gottfried Haberler from Milton Friedman’s file are transcribed below .
What strikes me most is just how short this written record appears when compared to the paper steeplechase of university hiring and promotion procedures of the present day.
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HARVARD UNIVERSITY
CAMBRIDGE 38, MASSACHUSETTS
Office of the Provost
April 4, 1952
Confidential
Professor Milton Friedman
University of Chicago
Chicago, Illinois
Dear Professor Friedman:
I am happy to learn from President Conant that you have kindly consented to serve on the ad hoc committee to consider an appointment in our Department of Economics. The committee will hold its meeting on Friday, April 18, at ten o’clock in the Perkins Room in Massachusetts Hall.
The position to be filled is that of Associate Professor of Economics. This rank carries permanency of tenure, and an assured progress toward a full professorship provided the man appointed lives up to expectations. For this reason we are seeking as good a young man as we can find in the age bracket under approximately forty years.
The Department of Economics has recommended Dr. James B. Duesenberry. I enclose for your scrutiny a copy of the Department’s recommendation, which, like all the material presented to the ad hoc committee, is strictly confidential. The next step in procedure is for the specially appointed ad hoc committee to advise the President and the Provost. In this connection not merely should the qualifications of Dr. Duesenberry be assessed, but he should also be compared with other men of his age group in the same field.
If there are any questions I can answer before the meeting of the committee, please do not hesitate to let me know. I am also enclosing a special travel voucher for your convenience in reporting your travel expenses in connection with the meeting of the ad hoc committee.
Sincerely yours,
[signed] Paul H. Buck
Paul H. Buck
Provost
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COPY
HARVARD UNIVERSITY
Department of Economics
Office of the Chairman
M-8 Littauer Center
Cambridge 38, Massachusetts
February 18, 1952
Provost Paul H. Buck
5 University Hall
Dear Provost Buck:
At its meeting of February 12th, the Department of Economics unanimously decided to recommend Assistant Professor James S. Duesenberry for promotion to an Associate Professorship beginning in the academic year 1952-1953.
The meeting was attended by Professors Black, Chamberlin, Dunlop, Galbraith, Hansen, Harris, Leontief, Mason, Slichter, and Smithies, all of whom voted in favor of the promotion. Professors Gerschenkron, Haberler, and Williams and Dr. Taylor who were unavoidably absent from the meeting have all indicated their approval.
I am attaching a brief curriculum vitae of Duesenberry and a list of his publications and papers.
We make this recommendation after a careful survey of all the economists in the country whom we felt might be qualified or available for an Associate Professorship. Altogether we considered about twenty young economists, both in the United States and abroad. It is our judgment that none of them could serve this faculty better than Duesenberry and very few if any of them are on a par with Duesenberry.
He is undoubtedly one of the very few outstanding young economists in the country. I know that if he were to indicate his availability he would be flooded with offers from many leading universities. To illustrate, the University of California has just lost Fellner to Yale and they have told me that they would gladly take Duesenberry as one of their two leading economists in Economic Theory.
When we had narrowed our list down, it included Baumol at Princeton, Dorfman at California, Tobin at Yale, Goodwin who is now in Cambridge, England, and Robert Rosa of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Rosa appealed to many of us particularly. He has had a brilliant career in the Bank which has merely been an extension of the brilliance he has shown throughout his professional career. I knew him as an undergraduate at Michigan, and he has fulfilled all the promise he showed at that time. Unfortunately, he finally decided that he was not available. Otherwise, we might have recommended Rosa’s appointment in conjunction to that of Duesenberry since we have two vacancies that we can fill.
Where Rosa would have been largely complementary to Duesenberry in view of his specific banking experience, the others on the list are more competitive with him. We were particularly impressed with Baumol who some of us know and Tobin who all of us have known for some years. Both these men are undoubtedly first class intellectually, and it would be difficult to rate them below Duesenberry. However, Duesenberry has shown a breadth of interest and a willingness to relate economics to other disciplines that the others have not yet demonstrated to the same extent. Goodwin and Dorfman are also of first-class intellectual ability, but we felt that they too were more specialized in their interests than Duesenberry.
In the last few years, Duesenberry has shown a remarkable capacity to bring together the fruits of theoretical and empirical research. His interests are now leading him in the direction of an historical study of the problem of economic development, and he has been cooperating on an experimental course on economic motivation with a member of the Social Relations Department. I believe that economies has suffered seriously in recent years from over-specialization. In particular, the theorists and the statisticians have tended to feel that the truth has been revealed only to them. History until recently has attracted far too little interest. I am confident that Duesenberry will be an important influence in reversing these tendencies.
Duesenberry made a name for himself nationally and internationally with his first book, Income, Saving, and the Theory of Consumer Behavior. His new hypothesis of “ratchet effects” has helped to avoid many of the mistakes that had previously been made in attempting to predict consumer behavior and has wide general implications for economic analysis. In this and his other work, he has already helped to rescue economies from the straight-jacket of static analysis, and I am sure he will do much more.
In view of the present needs of the Department, I wish we could have found a man who combined all Duesenberry’s other qualities with striking performance on the lecture platform. Unfortunately, that has not been possible. However, while not a striking lecturer, Duesenberry has been and will continue to be a very effective part of our undergraduate teaching. He has been a tutor in Dunster House for some years and as such has been a conspicuous success. He has also proved to be the member of the Department best equipped to teach the senior course in economic analysis for honors students. In these respects he will prove to be an important addition to the permanent staff from the point of view of undergraduate teaching.
On personal grounds, the Department looks forward very much to having Duesenberry as a permanent member. He will combine a thoroughly independent point of view with an understanding attitude towards differences of opinion with his colleagues. In general, it is the unanimous view of the Department that we could hardly make a recommendation in which we had greater confidence.
Yours Sincerely,
/s/ Arthur Smithies
Chairman
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JAMES STEMBLE DUESENBERRY
Born July 18, 1918
B.A., University of Michigan, 1939
M.A., ibid., 1941
Ph.D., ibid., 1948
Teaching Fellow, University of Michigan, 1939-1941
U.S.A.A.F., 1942-1946.
Instructor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1946.
Teaching Fellow, Harvard University, 1946-1948.
Assistant Professor, Harvard University, 1948 to present
Publications
Books:
Income, Saving, and the Theory of Consumer Behavior, Harvard University Press, 1949.
Business Cycles and Economic Development, to be published in the fall of 1952 by McGraw-Hill Company.
Articles:
“Income Consumption Relations”, Income, Employment and Public Policy, Norton, 1948.
“The Mechanics of Inflation”, Review of Economics and Statistics, May, 1950.
“Mr. Hicks and the Trade Cycle”, Quarterly Journal of Economics, September, 1950.
“The Role of Demand in the Economic Structure”, Studies in the Structure of the American Economy, in press.
“Some Aspects or the Theory of Economic Development”, Explorations in Entrepreneurial History, December 1950.
“The Leontief Input-Output System”, (ditto); to be published in a volume on Linear Programming by Paul Samuelson.
Papers Read but not Published:
“Some New Income-Consumption Relationships and Their Implications”, Econometric Society, January, 1947.
“Induction Evidence of the Propensity to Consume”, American Economic Association and the Econometric Society, December, 1947.
The Present Status of the Consumption Function” Conference on Income and Wealth, June, 1950.
“Theory of Economic Development”, Econometric Society, December, 1951.
“Needed Revisions in the Theory of Consumer Expenditures”, Econometric Society, September, 1950.
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HARVARD UNIVERSITY
GRADUATE SCHOOL OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION
Gottfried Haberler
Professor of Economics
325 Littauer Center
Cambridge 38, Massachusetts
March 20, 1952
Provost Paul H. Buck
Harvard University
Cambridge, Mass.
Dear Mr. Buck:
If you permit, I should like to add my personal views on the proposed appointment of James Duesenberry as Associate Professor. May I say that I know Duesenberry intimately and that I have been increasingly impressed by his work. The little book, INCOME, SAVING AND THE THEORY OF CONSUMER BEHAVIOR, which he published with the Harvard University Press, is generally regarded as one of the most important and original contributions to the widely discussed and extremely important subject of the relations of national income, saving and consumption. It has been much and favorably commented upon. Duesenberry displays the rare talent of combining theoretical analysis, statistical analysis and sociological insight in a most illuminating and successful manner. He is also a very inspiring teacher.
In recent years he has turned his attention to the also much discussed problems of economic development. The parts of his forthcoming book which I have seen display a mastery of combining different approaches in a most fruitful way. His eminence in this particular field, which in a very welcome way rounds out the field covered by members of our department, is widely recognized in the economic profession at large. He was asked to address the convention of the American Economic Association last December, and Professor Innis of Toronto, the new president of the American Economic Association, has asked him to speak again on the problem of economic development at the next annual meeting of the Association.
To sum up, in my opinion the appointment of Duesenberry will greatly strengthen the Economics Department, enhance its reputation and help attract first rate students.
Very sincerely yours,
/s/ G. Haberler
G. Haberler
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HARVARD UNIVERSITY
DEPARTMENT OF ECONOMICS
Cambridge 38, Massachusetts
March 24, 1952
Provost Paul Buck
University Hall
Harvard University
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Dear Provost Buck:
In anticipation of my appearance before the ad hoc committee, I would like to state my reasons for having vote [sic] in support of the departmental recommendation for appointment of Assistant Professor Duesenberry as associate professor. I have followed Jim’s development from the time he became, on my recommendation, an economics instructor and assistant in my undergraduate course on economic theory.
Duesenberry is one of the few outstanding young economists who established their reputation in the post war years. Baumol, Arrow, Goodwin and not more than one or two others, could be named as belonging to the same group. Among these, Duesenberry distinguished himself through his notable breadth of interest and what is in a sense more important, his remarkably productive scientific imagination. His well known contributions to the theory of consumption and the not yet published equally original work in the field of economic development, reveal a singular combination of intuitive insight, practical sense and theoretical “know-how”.
Duesenberry has already taken an important part in the work of the Harvard Economic Research Project, and I have no doubt that he will play a leading role in the development of economic and general social science research at Harvard.
Although not typically a smooth lecturer, Duesenberry is very effective in a classroom. His enthusiasm and real interest in students makes him an excellent tutor and undergraduate advisor.
If in its subsequent recommendations for permanent appointments we succeed in keeping our sights as high as in the present choice the future prospects of the Economics Department would be very bright indeed.
With best regards.
Sincerely yours,
/s/ Wassily Leontief
Wassily Leontief
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HARVARD UNIVERSITY
CAMBRIDGE 38, MASSACHUSETTS
Office of the President
April 19, 1952
Dear Professor Friedman:
I am returning herewith material which I believe you left in the Perkins Room at the time of the ad hoc committee meeting yesterday.
Sincerely yours,
[signed] Virginia Proctor
Virginia Proctor
Secretary to the President
Professor Milton Friedman
Department of Economics
University of Chicago
Chicago 37, Illinois
Source: Hoover Institution Archives. Papers of Milton Friedman, Box 24, Folder “25.29 Correspondence. Duesenberry, James S.”
Image Source: Harvard College. Classbook 1957.