Schama plans to teach a year-long course on environmental history, which he hopes will contribute to his next book on landscape and memory.

He also plans to continue his unorthodox classroom method, encouraging his students to focus on the details of stories about the historical periods they are studying. It is an approach which, he says "fold[s] them into the world" of history.

"The point [is] to make contact with the lived reality of the past," he says. "I want the students to learn, remember and to embrace...the complicated human reality of these stories."

But he hopes that his initial reception at Columbia is not the same as that which he received upon arriving at Harvard 13 years ago.

"I would get up and give a lecture and I'd set up the argument, but a lot of the lecture would be filled with evidence...details," he says. "And I used to notice quickly that students would put down their pens."

"Story-telling [is] an extremely serious matter and [has] at least as much intellectual toughness and dignity and complexity as delivery of point one, two, and three," Schama says, his forehead furrowing. "[In my writing] the meat of the history is very often in story-telling.

Storytelling is one of the keys to understanding historical detail, Schama says. "When I was growing up," he recalls, "I was taught history would die on the page if it wasn't written not only for other professional working stiffs but also for the public."

Schama practices what he preaches. His books, The Embarrassment of Riches (1987), Citizens (1989) and Dead Certainties (1991), have all been critically acclaimed bestsellers--narrative histories dealing with European cultural and intellectual trends.

But it is precisely Schama's habit of flaunting standard historical practices of study that has often embroiled him in debates over the quality and accuracy of his scholarship.

Some historians have accused Schama of losing his objectivity by getting to close to his work. But Schama says the opponents of his style do not include his colleagues at Harvard.

"Its never been my take that we [History Department professors] take strict methodological differences," Schama says. "I've noticed tremendous generosity in the occasionally wacky experiments I've done."

Regardless of the recruitment strategies and backroom politics involved in the move, Harvard will feel Schama's loss deeply.

While professors and administrators have said that Harvard is becoming less complacent about losing in tenure bids, it may take the sting of Schama's departure to finally galvanize the faculty into action.

"There are more first-rate universities than years ago," says Womack. "Before, it used to be they would drop everything to come to Harvard."

The victim of this latest bidding war is Harvard's already ailing History Department.