While Harvard's faculty ranks seem to have been drained this year by an exodus of professors to Washington, D.C., the Faculty of Arts and Sciences countered the losses by securing at least 12 tenure acceptances.

Of the four women and eight men who accepted tenure offers this year, ten will join the Faculty in the fall, while the others will arrive in 1994. New senior faculty, including some professors who accepted offers during the 1991-92 academic year, will assume their posts in the Government, East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Afro-American Studies, Music and Fine Arts departments, among others.

But the most successful field this year was the physical sciences, which enticed five scholars to sign on to the Faculty. The first-ever tenured woman in the Physics Department, former Loeb associate professor Melissa Franklin, accepted an offer last September.

Franklin will be joined by fellow Fermilab researcher John E. Huth. Both particle physicists are involved in the search for the elusive "top quark." And Eric J. Heller, who examines the relationships between semi-classical and quantum mechanics, will come to the Physics and Astronomy departments in 1994 from the University of Washington.

The Chemistry Department will gain Eric N. Jacobsen, an expert on mechanic and organic chemistry. McKay Associate Professor of Materials Science Michael J. Aziz, who performs research on phase transformation kinetics, joins Franklin as another internal promotion in the physical sciences.

And Andrew McMahon, a researcher at New Jersey's Roche Laboratories who studies the regulation of central nervous system development, will join the Biochemistry Department in the fall.

As Harvard's Afro-American Studies Department steadily gained concentrators and national recognition, two African and African American studies specialists joined the Faculty.

University of Pennsylvania professor Evelyn Brook Higgenbotham, a scholar of Afro-American religious history, accepted a joint position in the Afro-American Studies Department and the Divinity School, and Suzanne Blier, the first ever full-time African arts specialist, will come to the Fine Arts department from Columbia.

Higgenbotham, who arrives in the fall of 1994, will be the only tenured Black woman professor in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the second ever. Her husband, U.S. circuit Judge Leon Higgenbotham, will hold a joint appointment at the Kennedy School of Government and the Law School.

And Seyla Benhabib, a political and social theorist who specializes in feminist thought, will be the second woman senior professor in the Government Department.

But there still remains a dearth of tenured women faculty members at Harvard, which ranked last this year in a list of 16 comparable schools by percentage of women tenured faculty. In an attempt to improve, the administration announced an affirmative action fund this spring to encourage hiring women and minorities.

The University has tried this year to respond to another of students' concerns, appointing a Latino tenured professor, but prominent Puerto Rican essayist and novelist Luis Rafael-Sanchez, invited as a visiting scholar, turned down an offer.

Peter G. Schultz, a University of California, Berkeley, biological chemist also rejected a tenure offer this spring.

The Faculty alleviated another shortfall this semester, however, when University of Washington professor Jay A. Rubin, formerly Reischauer visiting professor in 1990-91, accepted an East Asian Languages and Civilizations tenure offer to teach Japanese literature.

Last June, after the departure of another Japanese literature specialist and a tenure denial to a second, the department was left with just one senior and one junior faculty member in the discipline. Previously, four professors had taught courses in the subject.

The Near Eastern Languages and Literatures Department will gain Professor James Russel, a specialist in the history and culture of Mesopotamia.

In an exciting acceptance for the Music Department, Professor Robert D. Levin '68 joins the Faculty this fall. Levin, a world-renowned concert pianist, has specialized in completing many of Mozart's unfinished compositions.

Harvard played hardball with fellow Cambridge economic powerhouse MIT this year, snagging economic theorists Oliver Hart and Drew Fudenberg '78, while Professor of Economics Eric S. Maskin refused an MIT offer to join their faculty. Robert Bates, an expert in political economy of development, will join the Government Department.

But the loss of Dillon Professor of International Affairs Joseph S. Nye to the Clinton administration and Dillon Professor of the Civilization of France Stanley H. Hoffmann, who continues his sabbatical next year, means the government department will face a dearth of senior professors.

The University will also feel the loss of the History Department's Mellon Professor of the Social Sciences Simon M. Schama, who will assume a professorship of the humanities at Columbia University.

With senior professor Bernard Bailyn retiring this year, the History Department will also need to find new professors to fill gaps in the areas of modern European and American history. But Oxford professor Edward R. Owen arrives this fall to teach Middle Eastern political and economic history, and two senior searches have been in progress since last fall.

"We won't get anybody who will be able to do what [Schama] was able to do," said acting History Department Chair John Womack Jr. "But it won't be very long until we hire another professor in European history, and from the point of view of the department, we'll be fine."