Multiple commitments mean multiple offices, and English faculty are scattered across campus: from 45 Dunster St. to Warren House by the Harvard Union to 34 Kirkland St. to 8 Prescott St. There is also Cabot Professor of American Literature Alan C. Heimert's office in Bur Hall, and Gates' office on Mass. Ave.

The arrangement is less than ideal. Department members are separated physically, and also psychologically. Junior faculty are housed in a single building, and senior faculty don't often cross paths.

Dean of the Faculty Jeremy R. Knowles hopes the new humanities center, to be housed in the Union, will improve the department.

"There will be less time spent running from one place to another," Knowles says. The center will make it "easier for our faculty to fulfill all the many functions that they do."

"It will let us be friends," says Vendler. "We'll be bumping into each other in the corridors."

FRIENDSHIP AMONG ENGLISH faculty isn't always the norm. Many say the department remains fragmented.

Junior faculty members do not expect to stay past their three-to-seven-year appointments. Berkeley's Crews says the policy leaves Harvard with a staff of "brilliant young people who have a sense of possessing no future within the institution."

The "social and intellectual segregation" that results, Crews says, "has to have educational consequences for the student."

Other disputes within the department are academic, Fillingham says. Many faculty members "are people with real disagreements about what the study of English literature should be."

A new influx of faculty has led to a diversity of viewpoints within the department. It is now more cross-disciplinary, less traditional. Women's studies and Afro-American studies are much better represented in the curriculum.

New viewpoints are leading to changes in the department's structure. The faculty members, coming from different schools, are changing the department's longstanding tutorial system.

Many new professors considered Harvard's honors program too large. Half of Harvard's English concentrators are in the honors program, compared to only 20 percent at Stanford University.

English was one of the last big departments at Harvard to hold year-long, one-on-one junior tutorials. Now, individual junior tutorials for honors students last only a semester. A small-group seminar fills the other semester.

Fuculty members say the new system gives students more contract with professors. Most seminars are taught by faculty members, while graduate students and other instructors led the tutorials.

But Fillingham says professors don't necessarily make better advisor s than graduate students.