“He’s a renowned scholar who’s recognized not just in the field of American literature studies and modern literature more generally, but across disciplinary borderlines, among historians and philosophers as well,” Buell said.

He said this made Menand a perfect fit for the department’s vision of its future.

“Professor Menand’s unusual breadth of interest goes with that perception of the way that the modern university is and ought to be flowing: not crystallizing into self-contained compartments or enclaves, but engaging in all different forms of outreach,” said Buell.

Professor-Hunting

Dolan said Menand has been “very much part of the life” at CUNY—but added that in the Graduate Center’s decentralized setup, where most of the faculty is drawn from other colleges in the CUNY system, there was something missing for Menand.

“At the Graduate Center you’re spending half of your time somewhere else, so it has less centrality than something where the undergraduate and graduate programs are connected,” Dolan said.

Menand’s new home in Cambridge will provide such an intermingled academic milieu.

“He has not been part of a complete university situation,” said Damrosch. “He’s eager to do that.”

But when New’s search committee, convened last spring, came up with Menand’s name, it had to contend with competitors from not one but two other colleges seeking to poach him.

According to Buell, two New York schools—New School University and Columbia University—wanted Menand for themselves if he left CUNY, but Columbia’s was the main offer Menand considered before deciding on Harvard.

Columbia English Chair Jonathan Arac wrote in an e-mail that he thought it was a close call between the two Ivies.

“I think he would happily have come here, but he made another choice that he preferred,” he said.

Arac said Columbia’s talks with Menand began “in late fall” of 2002.

Meanwhile, Buell said, Harvard’s search committee had whittled down their “list of several dozen possibilities” to replace retiring Cabot Professor of American Literature Sacvan Bercovitch to a single pair—Menand and one other, whom Buell would not name—who came to Cambridge for talks and interviews this past winter. Menand, he said, was a smashing success.

“If the department wants to move ahead [with a prospective hire], they have to get a lot of testimony from the outside world—in this case Americanists, nationally and internationally—about the appointment,” Buell said. “All of that was strong in favor.”