Price cautions that while she had a supportive department, changing an atmosphere that has traditionally discouraged junior professors takes time.

“The administration has made clear that they’re committed to tenure younger people and to tenure more women…but everyone knows that changing the institutional culture will take a lot more than one promotion,” she wrote in an e-mail.

Buell said that while three of four offers of junior faculty positions were accepted in the English department this year, the fourth turned Harvard down for Brown because of better chances for tenure there.

“The reason given for the Brown acceptance is that historically tenure is a lot easier to get at Brown,” he said.

Interdisciplinary Hiring

Summers and Kirby have also said they want to offer tenure to scholars who do interdisciplinary work.

“I think the importance of interdisciplinary work is based on an increasing awareness of how interconnected a whole range of different knowledge has become,” said Homi Bhabha, the chair of the Committee on Degrees in History and Literature.

Pinker and Nowak, the two new recruits Summers often mentions, both do interdisciplinary work.

Pinker’s chair is in the Psychology Department’s Mind, Brain and Behavior program, one of the interdisciplinary concentrations that Summers has praised.

Summers has read Pinker’s work and pushed hard to recruit the cognitive scientist, contacting him at MIT and inviting him to Elmwood, the presidential mansion.

Pinker’s work focuses on language acquisition and conceptual development.

Nowak, currently at Princeton, will hold a rare joint appointment in the mathematics and the organismic and evolutionary biology departments.

His arrival came with a $30 million gift to establish a center in mathematical biology. Summers has often touted his plans to encourage work in the life sciences.

“Summers has heightened awareness for the potential of making interfaculty appointments,” said FAS Associate Dean for Academic Affairs Vince Tompkins.

Summers has the final say on appointments within FAS, and professors say that he has already taken a more vocal role his predecessor, Neil L. Rudenstine.