Why Harvard Business School Denied Tenure—Even When the Academic Case Was Strong

On paper, Ben Edelman was a textbook tenure candidate at Harvard Business School. Over an 11-year timeframe, his intellectual contributions were indisputable. His teaching record passed muster.

Yet his tenure case ended in rejection.

The reason, according to then–Dean Nitin Nohria, had nothing to do with scholarship or pedagogy. Edelman, Nohria said, failed to meet Harvard’s community standards—an opaque and deeply consequential judgment that raises uncomfortable questions about how elite institutions define merit, character, and accountability.

“THERE’S NO DOUBT HE’S AN OUTSTANDING SCHOLAR’’

In sworn deposition testimony, Nohria made clear that Edelman’s academic credentials were not the problem.

“There’s no doubt he’s an outstanding scholar in an important field,” Nohria testified, confirming that both he and the faculty subcommittee unanimously concluded Edelman met Harvard’s intellectual standards. Teaching, while discussed, was not disqualifying either. “My overall sense,” Nohria said, was that Edelman met the teaching bar as well.

The former dean made these comments in a lawsuit Edelman has filed against Harvard Business School. Already, the case has put into evidence 1241 pages of materials, including excerpts from 11 deposition transcripts, 163 exhibits, five sets of interrogatory responses, and affidavits from Edelman and Nohria.

This week Associate Justice of the Massachusetts Superior Court Kenneth W. Salinger heard arguments on motions for a summary judgment in the case, a chance for the court to decide all or part of the case based on undisputed facts, without a trial. Harvard, of course, wants the case thrown out. Edelman hopes the judge will rule in his favor of his claim that HBS breached its duty of good faith and fair dealing in denying him tenure. The judge is expected to rule shortly. Harvard had already lost an earlier attempt to get the case dismissed from the same court.

A FACULTY VOTE IN SUPPORT OF TENURE 

Regardless, Edelman’s tenure decision at Harvard faltered on the third and least clearly defined criterion: community standards.

“We have three standards that faculty members need to meet,” Nohria explained. “An intellectual standard, a teaching standard, and our community standards.” On that final measure, he said, the Faculty Review Board (FRB) “didn’t conclude affirmatively that he met our community standards.”

Tenure decisions at Harvard are rarely unanimous, and Nohria emphasized that faculty disagreement is not unusual.

“If you’ve ever been a part of a faculty, you never resolve anything,” he said. “That’s the nature of the faculty. People disagree.”

In Edelman’s case, the disagreement was stark. When the Appointments Committee voted in 2017, 41 faculty members supported tenure, 29 opposed it, and two abstained — a 58.5% vote in favor.

Nohria did not consider that close enough.

“Anything that isn’t like 85 or 90% is not a clear mandate,” he testified. The vote, he said, fell into what he described as a “zone of discretion,” where the faculty effectively tells the dean: You have to decide.

And decide he did — against tenure.

THE INCIDENTS THAT CHANGED THE CONVERSATION

According to Nohria, his concerns about Edelman’s colleagueship intensified after two highly public incidents in 2014: one involving an online advertising company called BlinkX, and another involving a dispute at the Szechuan Garden restaurant in Cambridge (See An HBS Prof’s $4 Spat Over Spicy Chicken). At BlinkX, Edelman publicly called out the ad tech firm for allegedly deceptive adware install practices, while Blinkx countered by claiming that Edelman failed to disclose financial ties to clients who have shorted the company’s stock.

“These incidents clearly created a firestorm,” Nohria testified. “The Chinese restaurant situation, for sure. I don’t think I have received more emails pertaining to a faculty member in my time as dean ever around that incident.”

The BlinkX matter, he said, was serious — but the restaurant episode dominated faculty reaction. “In relative terms,” he said, “the Chinese restaurant incident was a tsunami of incoming.”

Asked whether those events changed how he viewed Edelman as a colleague, Nohria was direct: “At a minimum, he had led many people to believe that he had acted in a manner that they thought was unbecoming of a faculty member at Harvard Business School.”

“BLIND SPOTS” AND THE FAILURE TO CHECK IN 

What troubled Nohria most, according to his testimony, was not any single incident but what he viewed as a pattern.

“I concluded that he continued to have blind spots in relationship to how others might see situations that he would see differently,” Nohria said. Edelman, he testified, repeatedly relied on his own judgment in situations where “it would have been very easy to check in with someone else.”

Nohria cited multiple examples: the restaurant dispute, disclosure issues connected to BlinkX, and Edelman’s involvement in litigation, including a lawsuit against American Airlines.

“These are just things where you don’t have to say whether you should do it or not,” Nohria said. “But just having the ability to talk to someone to get a second opinion… would allow you to make better decisions — and he repeatedly seemed to not want to do that.”

The risk, Nohria argued, was institutional.

“As a tenured faculty member where you get permanent employment, and it’s very difficult at that point to check or monitor your behavior, those would create undue risk for the institution,” he said. “Which it was my job as dean to protect.”

A SECOND CHANCE–AND LINGERING DOUBTS

After the 2014 incidents, Edelman was given a two-year extension before a final tenure decision. Nohria described it as an opportunity.

“I think the two years was an opportunity for Mr. Edelman to find a way to persuade the school that he met the standards of being a good colleague,” he said.

Nohria testified that Edelman acknowledged the issues and promised to change. “He said, ‘I’ve learned from the situation. In the future, I will reach out to people.’”

But by 2017, Nohria said he was no longer confident those lessons had been fully internalized.

“By the end of this period,” he testified, “I couldn’t feel confident that he had fully internalized what he said he was going to internalize.”

Edelman has consistently disputed the idea that his tenure denial reflected a fair or proportionate assessment of his conduct — or that “community standards” were applied in a clear, consistent, or even-handed way.

NOT A FAILURE OF COLLEGIALITY BUT A FAILURE OF PROCESS

At the center of his argument is the belief that Harvard’s tenure process shifted midstream, transforming isolated controversies into a cumulative character judgment untethered from formal standards. Edelman has argued that neither the BlinkX matter nor the Szechuan Garden incident resulted in findings of wrongdoing that would ordinarily disqualify a faculty member from tenure, and that he was never accused — much less proven — to have violated any written Harvard policy (See his YouTube video given his perspective).

In Edelman’s view, the problem was not a failure of collegiality, but a failure of process.

He has maintained that the Faculty Review Board did not conclude that he failed Harvard’s community standards — only that it could not affirmatively conclude that he met them — a distinction that became decisive only when the burden effectively shifted onto him to prove collegiality in ways that were never clearly defined. Edelman has argued that this standard is inherently subjective, vulnerable to reputational cascades, and particularly dangerous when applied retroactively after public controversy.

Edelman has also rejected the suggestion that he ignored advice or failed to learn from earlier episodes. He has pointed to steps he took after 2014 to consult colleagues, seek guidance, and avoid actions that could be misconstrued — efforts he believes were discounted or minimized once skepticism about his candidacy had hardened.

A RARE EXAMPLE OF A SCHOLAR WHO MET ACADEMIC STANDARDS BUT FAILED A SCHOOL’S CULTURAL BAR

Perhaps most fundamentally, Edelman has questioned whether the tenure decision ultimately reflected an assessment of future risk rather than past performance — a shift, he argues, that transforms tenure from a judgment about academic merit into a speculative bet on personality. In that framework, he contends, tenure becomes less about protecting scholarly independence and more about enforcing conformity, particularly for faculty whose work or conduct attracts public scrutiny.

Edelman’s tenure denial stands as a rare example of a scholar who met Harvard’s academic standards but failed to clear its cultural bar. In Nohria’s telling, the case was not about punishment, personality, or popularity — but about whether the institution could trust someone with a lifetime appointment.

“Our appointments standards are not anything other than,” Nohria said, “Does the person meet our intellectual standards? Does the person meet our teaching standards? And does the person meet our community standards?”

In Edelman’s case, Nohria concluded, the answer to the third question was no — and that was decisive.

DON’T MISS: A Judge Opens The Curtain On Harvard Business School’s Tenure Process or Harvard ‘Supportive’ of Spicy Chicken Prof

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