He said the University’s willingness to continue hiring is particularly notable in light of the faltering economy.

“We have to get permission to search in these areas, and the University could say, ‘We’re hurting financially and you can’t do it, you’ll have to postpone it,’” Hart said.

‘A No-Brainer’

Harvard has a reputation for not offering tenure to junior faculty, who are often the younger professors Summers says he wants to keep.

Yet, as two-career couples become the norm, Harvard cannot expect professors to leave homes in other cities for Harvard at late points in their career.

Buell said that under his watch, the professional situation of a scholar’s partner has been a factor in every rejection of a position, junior or senior, in Harvard’s English department.

“It accounts in one way or another for every single case where we’ve offered and it’s been turned down,” he said.

Chair of the Department of Government Roderick MacFarquhar said “tenuring from within is a no-brainer.”

“It is enormously difficult and time consuming and costly to take people away from other universities,” he said.

Buell said Summers has pushed departments “not to hold back from presenting cases of high achievement and great promise because of some imagined iron rule or standard that junior people must meet in the eyes of the administration.”

An assumption that candidates must have published two significant books to be considered at Harvard, Buell said, has been set aside in recent years.

Summers said that as he has considered junior faculty promotion cases, he had paid attention to “teaching and academic citizenship” and that “as we review appointments in departments, we’re always considering the role of how the appointment will affect the junior faculty who are at Harvard and their prospects for promotion.”

Nevertheless, progress has been slow. Price, for example, is only the second junior professor promoted from within the English department in the last 12 years.

And despite Summers’ and Kirby’s emphasis, it is still unclear whether Harvard’s junior faculty this year were more likely to be promoted.

Internal promotions represented three of the 21 tenures, a drop from the total of 12 internal promotions made during the last two years. This year’s numbers are not final, however.