Four years ago, Lawrence A. Buell was an English professor at Oberlin College. He was comfortable, established, and involved at Oberlin; he had served there as chair of the English department and dean of a admissions.

But a tenure offer from Harvard's English Department a few years ago tore Buell away from his Ohio home.

That probably wouldn't have happened 10years ago. What lured Buell was a relatively recent characteristic of the English Department: change.

While Buell says he respected Harvard's older English scholars, he saw a new commitment in the department to attract fresh faculty and to experiment with a once-stagnant model.

"The cast of characters was both shifting rapidly and it was diversifying in terms of the approaches--the mental universe--of people in the faculty," says Buell, now Harvard's associate dean for undergraduate education. "You're moving from one era to the next, so to speak."

Buell, a scholar of American transcendentalism, is a part of that new era--as are a host of new professors that have joined the Department of English and American Literature and Language over the past five years.

In a feature article this summer, The Chronicle of Higher Education described Harvard's English Department as "intellectually crackling," and noted some of its newest stars, including Leo Damrosch, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Barbara Johnson, D.A. Miller and Elaine Scarry.

The English Department, once so fragmented that its members couldn't agree on new appointments, now receives praise from scholars inside and outside the University.

But some question whether the department's renewal has also benefited students.

It's perennial issue for Harvard's star-studded departments. When choosing faculty, should they aim for research and prestige, or should they focus on educational benefits? Or do the two conflict at all?

THE ENGLISH DEPART-ment's rapid transformation makes these issues even more immediate. And that shift has attracted attention at rival universities.

"Even since the University of California was founded, it looked over its shoulder at Harvard in all respects," says Frederick C. Crews, chair of the English department at the University of California at Berkeley.

But in recent decades, Crews says, "we felt that Harvard wasn't as much of a threat as it ought to be.

"This has definitely changed now," says Crews, who describes Harvard's department as "enormously strengthened."

The department's rejuvenation began in 1987, when then-President Derek C. Bok decided to intervene and reverse the department's increasingly poor reputation.