Responding to an article in the Harvard Crimson, the Stanford Daily confirms that black scholars Lawrence Bobo and Marcyliena Morgan, who are husband and wife, have been offered tenured slots at Harvard—just a few years after Morgan was rejected for tenure by Lawrence Summers. From the sound of it, Bobo and Morgan are going to get some serious raises wherever they go.

According to Stanford dean of the humanities and sciences Richard Saller,

“Both of them play a really vital role in the intellectual community here,” he said. “They are leaders and we will be extremely aggressive in convincing them to stay.”

I'm intrigued by the comments appended to the article, which basically say, "Wait a minute—they just got here!"

You can't blame a working couple for taking the best offer they get, of course. We've all only got one life to live. But jumping back and forth like this does represent a loss to the academic community; how can intellectual hopscotchers possibly contribute to the institution where they work in a meaningful, long-term way ? How, for example, could they help craft a new curriculum? And what happens to the institutional memory that is so important to the operation of a place like Harvard if a growing percentage of its faculty comes and goes every few years? Does it become more rooted in the quiet, secretive bureaucrats—the vice-presidents of this and that—who don't always share the values of the academics?

Individually, such hopscotching is good for scholars. But collectively, doesn't it weaken their position in the university?