Re: “An unequal tenure” (Feb. 17): As a member of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Tenure and Appointments Committee which revised Yale tenure procedures, and as someone married to an academic, who began co-parenting two children before receiving tenure, I think Kate Maltby ’10 has the implications of Yale’s tenure system for families backwards.

Yale, like peers such as Harvard and Princeton, has a standard of world leadership for granting tenure. We feel it is much more humane to give junior faculty additional time (eight years versus six) to establish their place in their fields before they are judged against that standard. In addition, Yale, unlike our peers, has guaranteed junior faculty who progress at a good rate two full years of paid research leave during those eight years, something unprecedented and done at significant cost to the University.

Finally, Yale grants all junior faculty up to two years additional time to tenure decision based on its family care leave policy mentioned by Maltby. While increasing the percentage of tenured women on our faculty remains a challenge, our tenure system and clock are not the problem but a component of the solution. The Yale community can take pride in having the most family-friendly tenure system of any elite university.

A. Douglas Stone

Feb. 17

The writer is the Carl A. Morse Professor of Applied Physics and a member of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Tenure and Appointments Committee.