THE English and History Departments are case studies in the failure of the tenure system. Despite their claim that their high standards prevent them from tenuring more than an infinitesimal fraction of their own junior faculty, these departments are rapidly losing stature nationwide.

The situation may be changing in History: Two junior professors, Hue-Tam Ho Tai and H. Leroy Vail, have been promoted to tenure in the last year. But the English Department hasn't seen the writing on the wall.

The department has three outstanding tenure offers to D.A. Miller, Stephen Greenblatt and Lawrence Buell. If none of these scholars accept tenure, the outside committee of scholars that helped the English Department make these offers over the last two years will have accomplished nothing. And Department Chair Robert J. Kiely has announced only one junior faculty appointment for next fall.

Thus, the department will continue to lag far behind student interest in areas such as modern American literature and Victorian literature. Although its problems are of a slightly different nature, Afro-American Studies also suffers at the hand of the tenure system. Its inability to attract faculty members has resulted in a situation in which no courses will be taught this fall by members of the department.

IN THE short term, Dean of the Faculty A. Michael Spence must take two courses of action to combat the department-level and system-wide tenure problems.

He must exact a committment from the English Department to prevent the number of course offerings from further declining. The department should make counteroffers to the junior faculty and encourage them to stay. But for every junior professor who leaves, a new one must be hired.

He must assemble a faculty committee (along the lines of last year's Verba Committee on faculty affirmative action) to suggest sweeping changes in Harvard's tenure system. The use of secretive and capricious ad-hoc committees to advise President Bok on tenure cases should be abolished and replaced by a Faculty-wide system in which no department could block tenure appointments at will. The University should institute a tenure-track system, which would guarantee each junior faculty member a realistic chance of receiving a tenured position.

Although Spence has made improving the tenure prospects of junior faculty a top priority during his five-year deanship, the old guard shows no signs of giving, and the young administrator has shown no will to take the kind of dramatic action necessary.

The situation in English demonstrates that there is more at stake now than the careers of a handful of young faculty members. At a time when the number of Ph.D.'s is declining and the number of faculty retirements is on the rise, the ability of the University to remain in the forefront of academia is threatened.