Nearly half of the faculty in the English department will go on leave at some point next year, including some of its most prominent professors.

The “highly abnormal” number of English professors taking either semester or year-long sabbaticals next year—15 of its 35 current professors—is due to a change in Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) policy that increases the frequency of leaves, according to Chair of the Department of English and American Literature and Language Lawrence Buell.

“It’s a non-recurring event, I’m confident,” Buell said. “It’s caused by chiefly the transition into the new FAS-wide senior sabbatical policy, which makes people eligible for leaves twice as often as before.”

All but four of the professors going on leave are senior faculty, including such academic heavyweights as Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value Elaine Scarry, DuBois Professor of the Humanities Henry Louis “Skip” Gates Jr., and Cogan University Professor Stephen Greenblatt.

But Buell said the department’s offerings would be undiminished.

The vacancy left by the absent faculty will be partially offset by a larger than normal new group of assistant professors, a contingent of visiting scholars and several confirmed and pending appointments of senior faculty.

“We’re going to be able to field a full array of courses,” Buell said.

In anticipation of next year, the English department has instituted a more aggressive hiring program than usual, Buell said.

The department has already made two senior appointments—one from within the department and one from outside—and is pursuing two more, in addition to three new assistant professors in 20th Century Studies.

“We stepped up the number of regular assistant professors whom we’ve hired for next year, we’ve tried to speed up the pace of our senior recruitment for next year, and we’ve hired some visitors,” Buell said.

The increased hiring is not only to fill next year’s temporary vacancies, but also to compensate for a year in which little hiring can be done, according to Buell.

“There needs to be a critical mass of regular faculty to do replacement hiring in a proper way,” Buell said. “There will be a one year lull, I won’t say hiatus. We have absolutely not mortgaged our future.”

The only professor who does not plan to return to Cambridge after his leave of absence is Assistant Professor of English Erik I. Gray, who will be departing for a position at Columbia University, English department administrator Margaret M. Hamilton wrote in an e-mail. Gray could not be reached for comment.

Associate Professor of English John Stauffer, who will be gone for the full year, downplayed the possible impact of the leaves on the English department.

“I don’t think that the number of faculty going to be on leave next year means the department will suffer unduly vis-à-vis other years,” Stauffer said.

“Yeah, it means some courses students want to take next year won’t be available and they’ll have to wait until next year,” Stauffer said. “There might be some problems in terms of scheduling, but it’s not as though half of the department is going on leave.”

English concentrator Meghan A. Day ’05 said she wasn’t aware of the number of professors going on leave next year, despite having heard vague rumors.

“It seems pretty typical for a student to try to build a harmony in their schedule, rather than just taking it one year at a time,” she said. “And definitely sometimes you look at the catalogue and think ‘next year,’ when that’s not a saf e way to do things with something like this going on.”

According to Day, she hadn’t received any formal notice of the absences, though she noted that at a recent junior tutorial sign-up meeting, students were told their junior projects were more likely to be supervised by graduate students.

“This year they said they’d rather you present an idea, then they’ll find a grad student,” Day said. “There was the sense that there would be fewer professors to go around.”

—Staff writer Ben A. Black can be reached at bblack@fas.harvard.edu.