For Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the semester that ends today was a time of ferment for one of the toughest higher-education issues of the decade: the role of women in the faculty.

The issue was dramatically spotlighted on three separate fronts in the last four months:

In October an official survey revealed that sexual harassment within the faculty is surprisingly widespread.

More than a third of all female students and faculty members had been sexually harassed by people with authority over them.

A month before the survey came the news of the most serious incident publicized to date of sexual harassment by a Harvard faculty member. In September, professors confirmed that Jorge I. Dominguez, a tenured government scholar, was officially punished over the summer by Rosovsky for sexually harassing a junior faculty member of the department.

The survey attracted nationwide attention and raised awareness of the issue on campus to an unprecedented level. It also prompted an official proposal for a comprehensive new policy for handling complaints of sexual harassment. Under the plan. Faculty administrators would create a new quasi-independent clearing house for all disputes concerning any sort of harassment.

November and December brought news of three tenure promotions for women in Harvard's junior faculty: Hindu-Religion scholar Diana L. Eck. Biochemist Nancy R. Kleckner, and French-literature specialist Susan R. Suleiman.

The low quotient of women in the ranks of tenured Faculty members--currently 17 out of about 350--has long been a source of bitter criticism from many Harvard teachers and students.

But this fall's trio of promotions represented a significant percentage of the 10 or 12 tenure appointments the Faculty usually makes each year. In that light they looked like harbingers of better odds for women's chances of gaining prestigious lifetime posts at Harvard.

Harvard took significant steps over the fall towards hiring its first tenured professor specifically to teach and research in the area of women's studies.

Currently, the field is represented in the Faculty only by an interdisciplinary committee of professors from other departments whose chief purpose is to keep track of courses that include topics in women's studies (It offers only one course of its own.)

The move to appoint a professor with half-time duties in the committee (and half-time in another department) was seen as a critical step towards legitimating women's studies throughout the Faculty and sparring further programs in the area.

Three department--Anthropology English, and Psychology--took up Rosovsky's offer to compete for the appointment, the results of which are expected to be announced in the spring.

Administrators and professors say the three developments coincided more by chance than by a single wide-ranging effort this fall to improve the lot of women in the Faculty. The issues of sexual harassment, tenuring women, and women's studies, they point out, have all been percolating on Faculty agenda for several years. "I don't think there was a scheme to make this the year of the woman," says John R. Marquand, assistant dean of the College.

Moreover, the fall's advances appear to be the confluence of various outside pressures, not a unified drive from witching University Hall.