A recent surge of debate about women's scholarship on college campuses has placed Harvard's French program in the middle of a growing conflict over feminism in academia.

In the last year, two major newspapers have published articles attacking the Harvard French department as a hotbed of feminism.

And at least a few professors at other universities seem to agree that the French section of Harvard's Romance Languages and Literatures Department emphasizes feminist theory to a greater degree than it does other literary approaches.

But professors and students at Harvard deny that the program's focus is in any way unbalanced towards feminism, saying that while the professors are interested in feminist theory, all fields are represented in the small section, which in the fall will comprise six tenured professors and two junior faculty members.

The opening attack on the French literature curriculum came last year in an article in France's Le Figaro magazine, a weekly supplement of the conservative Le Figaro newspaper.

In that article, journalist Victor Loupan characterizes the Harvard French program as a community of feminist scholars devoted to the study of homosexual women of color.

At Harvard, "a classic author is a suspect author--better still, a banned author," he wrote. "A contemporary work will be taught there if its author is a woman (at least), of color (if possible) and homosexual (perfect)."

Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures Alice A. Jardine and Professor of Romance and Comparative Literatures Susan R. Suleiman, both internationally recognized scholars and authors, sued the magazine for libel and defamation, charging that the article blatantly misrepresented their academic qualifications.

Last month, a French court awarded Jardine 150,000 francs, approximately $30,000, which is the highest amount Le Figaro has ever paid in a lawsuit, and ruled that the paper had acted improperly in falsely reporting her academic credentials. A similar suit by Suleiman was dismissed because a court bailiff failed to deliver Suleiman's court papers before the filing deadline.

But the three judges upheld Loupan's right to criticize Harvard's French section, ruling, "If such a characterization is incontestably severe, it does not constitute, in itself, and attack on the honor or the consideration of the professors--and singularly of Ms. Jardine--as it is exclusively criticized as proceeding from debatable literary choices."

Although many of the details of Loupan's article were incorrect, such as the academic qualifications of the professors and the classes offered at the time the article was written, the question remains: Is the orientation of Harvard's French program overly feminist?

Alex Beam, a columnist for The Boston Globe, Writes in a February 10 op-ed piece that Loupan's main theme is accurate, even if a number of details are wrong.

"Harvard's French Department is not highly regarded, because it is viewed as a hotbed of modish feminist criticism," he writes.

Beam said again in an interview last week that the section is a "hotbed of neo-feminist criticism."

"That is not my personal judgment," he says. "That is the judgment I have heard rendered by scholars at other universities."