Top Universities Shoot the Moon in Pursuit of New Stars

Universities, like ball clubs and Hollywood studios, have always competed for the big names. Leah Price isn’t one of them.

But Price, a 32-year-old scholar of Victorian literature, finds herself nonetheless at the heart of a cross-country tug-of-war between two of America’s most prominent universities: UCLA and Harvard.

Price, whose scholarship includes examinations of love and sex in Victorian fiction and a look at the role played by -- gasp -- abridgements in the rise of the novel, won’t say which way she’s leaning in the (mostly) gentlemanly battle for her services.

Yet, at a time when faculty recruiting wars are more often fought over distinguished scientists or prominent minority professors, the eager pursuit of Price provides a window into the intensifying competition in academia for other sorts of top scholars, including women and young humanities stars.

It also reflects a new push at Harvard, led by President Lawrence H. Summers, to hang onto more of the university’s most gifted junior faculty members by offering them tenured positions earlier than tradition has allowed, officials there said.

And it spotlights the growing reputation of the UCLA English department for savvy, aggressive recruiting as the school tries to sell itself as a cutting-edge alternative to the Ivy League.

Price, whose research and teaching topics range from the history of the novel to detective fiction and even journalism, has taught for just two years at Harvard, where she earned her undergraduate literature degree summa cum laude.

She received her doctorate from Yale in 1998, then spent three years doing research at Cambridge University.

Yet this fall, in a move precipitated in part by UCLA’s interest, the Harvard English department offered to make her a full tenured professor, years ahead of the typical timetable. If she accepts, Price will become the first woman to rise to tenure through the college’s English department without a stop at another university.

“We have been so tremendously impressed with her intellectual firepower and her work in teaching that we took the leap, with full consciousness of how unusual it was,” said the chairman of Harvard’s English department, Lawrence Buell.

UCLA has yet to extend its own formal tenure offer, but officials say they are talking with Price. She has interviewed with department leaders and visited the campus as part of the university’s effort to woo her to the West Coast. She is spending the year on a fellowship and book leave at Stanford University’s humanities center.

“We’re not in any hurry,” said Thomas Wortham, chairman of UCLA’s English department. “Leah has to decide what’s going to make her happy. She’s a very fortunate young woman.”

If UCLA loses, Wortham said, he would have this satisfaction: “If our having identified a very exciting young scholar finally made Harvard come up into the mid-20th century in its hiring practices, we’re delighted.”

Reached by e-mail, Price declined to comment, saying she does not wish to “complicate negotiations that are still ongoing.” She said she would decide soon.

Neither side would discuss salary details or other possible inducements, such as offices, research assistants and grants. In the University of California system, tenured or tenure-track professors earn an average of $93,000. Harvard, a private institution, doesn’t divulge its salaries. Wortham said the UCLA department identified the young prospect through a search for an expert on 19th century British literature and was immediately struck by the quality of her scholarship.

“She’s doing very innovative work in a well-established field, and she’s demonstrating that at a very early stage in her career,” said Wortham, who also edits a leading scholarly journal on 19th century literature.

Across the country, Buell said the Harvard English department had been encouraged to act by Summers’ push for the university to make more tenure offers to younger scholars. Summers, an economist and Treasury secretary in the Clinton administration, won tenure himself from Harvard at the age of 28. He became president of Harvard in July 2001.

But the main impetus, Buell said, was Price’s innovative, even quirky, scholarship.

A specialist in 18th and 19th century British fiction who lists herself as at least competent in Dutch, French, Spanish, Italian and Latin, Price has published widely. Her first book, “The Anthology and Rise of the Novel” (Cambridge University Press, 2000), examined literary anthologies and shortened forms that other scholars have ignored.

Reviewers praised Price’s insights into, among other things, the less-than-thorough way that everyone reads, at least occasionally. Skimming, Price notes in the book, is much like abridging, while skipping is like anthologizing. This observation, one reviewer noted, is “delightfully scandalous,” especially in an academic context.

“Very few people, and even fewer academics, ever publicly admit to being bored by long novels, to skimming them, or to skipping to passages which seem more interesting,” reviewer Claudia Johnson wrote in the London Review of Books.

In her short career at Harvard, Price has taught courses on Victorian literature and technology and the 18th century novel.

She also conducted an honors seminar, “Sexing Victorian Fiction,” that examined the central role of love and sex in novels of the period, as well as the role the novel itself has played in forming society’s thinking about gender.

With readings from Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins and others, the course covered such issues as “sex and money, reading and shopping, work and marriage ... unsexed women and unmanned men, feminism and anti-feminism,” according to the course description. Needless to say, it was popular, Harvard professors said.

According to the schools trying to woo her, Price’s work is particularly unusual in light of her youth. Humanities professors typically don’t reach their creative peaks until their late 40s or early 50s, several academics said, unlike scientists and mathematicians, who often do so 10 to 20 years earlier.

The reasons for the difference are complex, several said, but they identified a factor: The humanities are interpretative disciplines in which scholars examine works of art through the prism of their own experience, returning again and again to a book, for instance, with new insights each time.

“That whole process is less linear than the quantitative fields, and filled with gaps and haphazardness,” Harvard’s Buell said. “To have such a mature critical thinker come on the scene so early and make a splash is just so unusual in the humanities. You don’t want to lose such a person if you can possibly avoid it.”

Price also has been helped because Harvard, UCLA and many other premier universities are searching for top scholars who are also women.

Although female students are now a 56% majority at U.S. colleges, a gender imbalance persists in the faculties, especially in the upper reaches, according to John Curtis, research director at the American Assn. of University Professors. Women represent fewer than one in five of the tenured faculty members at the nation’s four-year public and private universities.

The issue is certainly a factor in hiring, said Wortham, whose UCLA department has 38 men, all but one with tenure, and 20 women, 18 of whom are tenured. “To hire a woman at the senior level these days is a pretty arduous task, so you look at the younger ones. And they’re out there, like this one, and they’re good.”

The UCLA department is trying to sell itself against its Ivy League rival, which usually is first or tied for first in national rankings of English departments. UCLA places in the top dozen.

To close that gap, UCLA’s English department paints itself as more dynamic, diverse and contemporary than Harvard’s.

UCLA also has excellent rare book collections, great cultural facilities like the Getty nearby and, he said, “much, much better weather.”