At a University which seeks to recruit only the foremost scholars to its tenured ranks, maintaining and identifying excellence is a pressing mandate.

But as the History Department enters the 1990s with at least nine senior vacancies to fill and extensive teaching gaps in several fields, scholars inside and outside Harvard say that "fragmentation" and "factionalization" threaten to derail the faculty's efforts.

Many junior and senior professors say the department lacks a common vision--that ideological and methodological disputes over what makes "good history" have hindered the success of numerous appointment searches.

"There's a sense that...people are so divided," says one Harvard professor who requested anonymity. "The department has very little central direction."

"There's a lot of individualism," says Olwen Hufton, professor of history and of women's studies. "It's a very fragmented department...there are departments which have a better esprit de corps."

And Professor of History Charles S. Maier '60 agrees, saying, "some departments may work more cohesively, but here clusters of people follow their own agendas."

But some scholars have suggested that this diversity of vision was not always so, pointing to a once-prominent "Harvard School of History," characterized by a new American social history in the post-World War II era.

'Pathbreaking'

"It was quality--a pathbreaking vision of social history and intellectual history and cultural history," says Eugen Weber, a French historian at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) and a member of the visiting committee that oversees Harvard's department.

"There were scholars not only who knew traditional history, but who were very aware of new directions that you now take for granted," Weber says.

And Soviet historian Richard Pipes, who received his Ph.D. at Harvard in 1950 and has been a faculty member here ever since, says the History Department at that time had "a tremendous amount of cohesion that has been lost."

"Harvard at that time was much more of an in-bred place," says Pipes, who says most of the faculty at that time received their Ph.D.s from the University. "Our wives knew each other and we socialized together...it had its advantages."

Yet many prominent scholars say that if the Harvard School ever existed, it is no more.

David Thelen, editor of the Journal of American History and a professor at Indiana University, says "there are clearly schools that have developed strengths [in recent years], but I don't have that identification about Harvard."

Renewal