“President Summers didn’t seem to want to take up the challenge of recognizing that this is an important problem and make the issue his,” she said. “A lot of women faculty feel that this is one area of excellence that Harvard should proudly exercise leadership in, the way that other universities have.”

The presence of female presidents at peer institutions like MIT, the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton University gives them an advantage in dealing with the issue, according to the third professor.

But Summers disagreed that Harvard is disadvantaged, noting that the University has three female deans—“three times as many as it’s ever had in its history”—and four female vice presidents, out of six.

Summers said that the new mechanism implemented last month in response to the letter—by which divisional deans can seek out potential minority and female hires who do not fit cleanly into one of the University’s departments—was an “important institutional change that will enable much better tracking of University-wide objectives in this area than we’ve had before.”

The third professor said that while those efforts are important and serious, by themselves they do not represent an aggressive enough response.

“We feel that the problem is serious enough that one would want to put in place several kinds of mechanisms,” the third professor said. “In terms of symbolic politics, it would really be wise of him to want to signify very clearly his engagement with the problem.”

The first professor said Summers and Kirby “weren’t very clear on any specific things to be done” to address the issue.

“The basic message in many ways was let us figure out what to do and do it on our own terms,” she said.

The first professor added Summers “didn’t want to appear to be appointing people for demographic reasons.” She said that some faculty were “mystified” that Summers would suggest that not enough potential female faculty would meet Harvard’s standards.

“It’s been many years since anyone at Harvard (anyone who is moderately enlightened) has implied that tenuring more women would be fulfilling a quota or giving in to pressure,” Nancy Tobin ’49, research chair for the Committee for the Equality of Women at Harvard, wrote in an e-mail.

But Summers said that interpretation was a misunderstanding and that it is possible to recruit a diverse faculty.

—Laura L. Krug contributed to the reporting of this story. —Staff writer Stephen M. Marks can be reached at marks@fas.harvard.edu.