According to Thernstrom, who has been at Harvard since he was a graduate student in 1956, the number of tenured American historians has not increased since he arrived.

Presently, there are just five tenured specialists in American history, and the ratio of tenured to non-tenured Americanists is approximately one to one.

A target ratio would be more like two-thirds tenured faculty to one-third non-tenured faculty, says Professor of History James Hankins.

At other schools, such ratios are typical. Columbia's history department has ten tenured and four non-tenured professors of American history.

Princeton has approximately three tenured faculty members in American history for each two non-tenured professors in the field.

Part of the problem at Harvard, some students feel, is the department's longstanding reluctance to tenure its own junior professors.

Popular lecturer Alan Brinkley, who left Harvard after the department denied his tenure in 1987, is the example many still remember.

"You have no hope of being tenured no matter how good you are," says one history and Afro-American studies concentrator.

Faculty Searches

But professors in History say they are moving to remedy the lack of tenured Americanists.

"I really think that people are serious and that they know they have to have new bodies," Hankins says.

And Thernstrom says that "it would not be astonishing if we had four new faces in American history [soon]."

According to Hankins, one offer has been made and two other candidates are being seriously considered.

A Slow Process

But searching is a slow process, and the department is notoriously picky about selecting new colleagues.