It was in 1982, then, after the title "Professor of Philosophy" was securely before his name, that Goldfarb started organizational efforts and launched the activist phase of his life. With others, he began building a gay, bisexual and lesbian alumni group and slowly moved to strike against the prejudice students had complained about for years.

Their first initiative, launched in 1984, was to add sexual orientation to the list of categories in Harvard's anti-discrimination rule. He and others met with deans of Harvard's various schools and heard both resistance and support.

But eventually, "the moral arguments start adding up," he says. "Those moral arguments carry a lot of force." The revision passed in 1985, and Goldfarb became--and has since remained--a prominent campus figure.

Since 1985, things have changed, Goldfarb says. Today there are a number of openly gay faculty members, and they are beginning to organize around such issues as domestic partnership benefits, which the University recently granted to faculty and staff.

Goldfarb has been a unifying figure for organization and meetings on that issue, and he has also been prominent in the recent debate over the invitation of Gen. Colin L. Powell to speak at Commencement. This spring, he wrote a letter to President Neil L. Rudenstine and spoke out at student protest meetings.

"I think it [the invitation] indicates the members of the governing board were simply completely ignorant of and insensitive to the presence of the gay, bisexual and lesbian community here," he says.

He will next semester bring the activist and academic sides of his life together in the form of a house seminar on the explanation of causes of homosexuality, both psychological and physiological. He hopes the seminar will continue and extend his efforts to reach out to students, and Goldfarb says he will likely "stay around for dinner often at North House."

He lives in an apartment 10 minutes away from the Yard and walks to work. He takes time off from both activism and scholarship to hike and listen to a 500-strong CD collection, which is heavy on the Romantic composers. He reads Wittgenstein and the occasional contemporary gay fiction. He cooks Indian food.

Cambridge is a comfortable place for a gay couple, he says, and Harvard is without doubt a comfortable place for a scholar. Warren Goldfarb is not likely to move anytime soon