In June, Goodwin, also a former aide to Johnson, said he was dropping out of the project so he would not "harm the women I love" and to "dismiss the totally absurd and irrational doubts that it wasn't her own work."

"If a woman gets involved in a situation, people assume she is being dominated. It's incredible, but that's what it's all about," he said. He didn't mention that he wasn't acting voluntarily, however, but within the strictures of the Government Department's request.

Kearns and Goodwin were unavailable for comment in early September, failing to answer phone messages. In Washington, Goodwin's answering service would only say that the couple were "away" and Kearns's answering service in Cambridge said only that she had been "in touch." A spokesman for her agent, Sterling Lord, said the agency had also been trying to reach Kearns for several days. There was no answer at Goodwin's Cape Cod hideaway.

But continued publicity, especially an article that appeared in The Washington Post in August quoting Kearns on her romance with Goodwin, has made a few Government professors uneasy. "These aren't the kinds of things that it's usual for someone to say in print," a professor, who asked not to be identified, said. And he called the way Kearns talks about her relationship with Johnson "shameful."

"She'll never again be able to gain intimacy with the subjects she studies," he added.

Kearns has taken the year off to finish the book and iron out her personal problems. (It is her second leave in three years.) She is on probation now. If she had kept her name out of the newspapers and waited several months before announcing a change of plans, she would have been beyond the reach of the department. Instead she was caught in the twilight area between the time the department votes tenure and the administration and the Corporation approve it. The impetus for the May reconsideration reportedly came from the administration, and it is between the dean and the president that the nomination may face its most serious obstacle.

To Dean Rosovsky, tenure is not very feudal. An economist, Rosovsky said the process was much more like a trust, with each professor a shareholder. The responsibility of each member is to find "the best possible person in the world in any field."

As dean of the Faculty, Rosovsky handles the administrative side of permanent appointments, gathering the opinions of an ad hoc committee and making his own decisions about the candidate.

The ad hoc committee--composed of professors from Harvard and other schools--usually meets for one day. "I sort of orchestrate this part," Rosovsky said. The committee calls witnesses, including anyone who has opposed the candidate in the department meeting. "We make sure the negative side is fully heard," he said.

Although Rosovsky declined to comment on specific cases ("I do not think these things should be part of the public discussion"), he said that slightly less than one in five candidates fail to make it past the ad hoc committee.

According to University guidelines for the ad hoc committees, the department must submit, along with other documents, a lengthy recommendation for an appointment and evidence that it has conducted an open search for "all possible candidates," especially for women and minorities.

The ad hoc committee doesn't exactly vote, but advises Rosovsky, who said he can always tell "if the vibes are right." When he's satisfied, he sends the nomination on to President Bok, who considers the appointment and if he likes it, sends it to the corporation, whose approval is usually automatic.

Although the president of the University rarely rejects a nomination, Rosovsky said that Bok has taken longer to approve appointments and in a few cases has considered them "more seriously" than past presidents.

In the Doris Kearns case, the nomination appears to have been somewhere between Rosovsky and Bok when the news about the Kearns book broke and Rosovsky organized and attended the two special departmental meetings.

The tenure process--which Rosovsky said judges candidates primarily on "scholarly output" and "good teaching performance"--was designed to consider candidates with long records in academia and whose published work is often the most important "input" into the decision. Here the system was faced with a talented 31-year-old woman who had only one, incomplete manuscript to show for her years at Harvard. In the back of everyone's mind, one professor said, was the psychological effect of the affirmative action program, making her appoinment more likely and helping her to obtain a unanimous recommendation in October.

But after the events of last spring, the Gov Department and the administration were having second thoughts. Their subsequent actions indicate they don't feel they made a mistake in approving Kearns, and still consider her a brilliant, if eccentric, scholar who deserves a chair here. But they made an exception to the rules of the game by not waiting for her completed manuscript. Now they're holding off to fit her appointment into the more traditional pattern of tenure.

If it's any consolation to Kearns, once she wins Corporation approval, she will achieve golden stature at Harvard. Even after Banfield left a tenured chair for a higher-paying post at Penn, the department welcomed him back without delay when he wanted to return. As one professor said, "If God takes one trip into nell, he's no less holy when he returns; he is still God, right?