"The president can be very helpful in recruiting," Rosovsky says. "And if he and the dean see the problem in the same way, that's helpful."

According to Ropes Professor of Economics Richard E. Caves, Summers could do the most to achieve his and Knowles' goal by encouraging colleagues to fundamentally question what they are looking for with candidates and whether they are rejecting qualified applicants because searches are too narrowly defined.

"You could change the standards you apply without changing the procedure. You could change the sort of scholarship that you value. You can argue that the person you want meets the standard, and that's where the debate takes place," Caves says.

But even if what Summers can contribute explicitly through action or message may be limited, some professors say his background as an economics professor may give him an advantage in approaching the problem.

Rosovsky said Summers' economic intuition would give him an effective problem-solving approach, and that the problem of increasing the size of the faculty was not an exception.

"Economists understand a variety of things," he says. "They understand marginal analysis and indirect effects. Economists are levelheaded individuals and adept at social analysis."

--Staff writer Daniel K. Rosenheck can be reached at rosenhec@fas.harvard.edu.