Subtle yet substantive changes aligning Harvard’s tenure procedures to those of other universities were announced by the Dean of the Faculty Tuesday.

In the first Faculty meeting of the year, Dean of the Faculty William C. Kirby reported on new procedures for soliciting information about tenure candidates as well as increased departmental support for junior professors.

“Overall my expectation is that these changes, and others you will hear of, will make our procedures more effective and efficient, will produce greater consistency and clarity...and thereby strengthen the Faculty,” he said.

But if Kirby aimed to clarify the rules, he tinkered with them as well.

“We will also be changing several of our procedures for the promotion to tenure,” he told the full Faculty Tuesday.

The most significant revision involves changing the format of a letter that departments send to academic experts soliciting information on potential candidates.

These “blind letters” have traditionally asked professors to rank a list of candidates without providing information about them or specifying which is most seriously under consideration.

Kirby said this format seemed unnecessarily indirect and that the new letters will identify any Harvard junior faculty member under consideration and include samples of recent or unpublished work.

The revised letter will also allow a department to indicate its own preferences.

This change—which Kirby outlined in a recent letter to department chairs—was based upon the recommendations of a committee on appointments which he convened last fall. A member of that committee stressed yesterday that the recommendations are not final, noting that the committee plans to meet at least once more.

Kirby said he is still working with the committee to revise the Faculty handbook to reflect the change and promised to make the new guidelines widely available.

“Indeed, we’re not only going to revise it, we’re going to publish it, so everybody knows,” he said.

Kirby has said for over a year that one of the main goals of the appointments review was increasing the transparency of the tenure process.

According to some faculty, that goal has been met.

“[The policy] is more transparent, more honest and has the effect of making internal appointments more likely rather than less,” said Professor of the History of Science Everett I. Mendelsohn.