But at the end of July, Gordon said, “the replies just weren’t coming.”

“And at that point I was told—and I think the other chairs who asked were told—‘We need to rethink what we can afford to do, so we’re trying to work it out, you’re going to have to wait a little longer,’” Gordon recalled.

In late August, word came from University Hall that the history department could initiate four of its seven proposed searches, Gordon said.

Around the same time, Nancy L. Rosenblum, chair of the government department, was told to postpone four proposed searches—two for junior professors and two for senior professors.

And some department chairs, such as van der Kuijp, Arthur Kleinman of Anthropology, and Xiao-Li Meng of Statistics, are still waiting for a response to their letters.

In any case, the late news from University Hall meant departments advertised for posts late, and were forced to rework long-term plans to compensate for anticipated searches that weren’t approved.

“Did this have to come at the end of August?” Rosenblum asked.

EMPTYING COFFERS

According to Meng, the statistics department chair, Kirby gave a speech “addressing all the rumors” of a Faculty-wide hiring slowdown at a department chair retreat at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Somerville, Mass., on Sept. 13.

One explanation Kirby offered for the change was an unexpectedly high “yield” of prospective professors who accepted Harvard’s offers to join the Faculty, several chairs said. According to Kirby’s Sept. 23 letter, that yield was 75 percent for senior faculty—“far above our historic norm,” Kirby wrote.

As a result, the Faculty grew faster than anticipated and, perhaps, too fast.

“I have, this year, wanted to slow down the hiring pace so as to catch our breath and to make sure that the many young faculty we’ve hired are properly guided and supported,” Venkatesh Narayanamurti, the dean of the physical sciences, wrote in an e-mail.

But the Faculty’s rapid growth was apparent to administrators at least two months before they called on department heads to reduce their hiring. On June 3, Kirby told The Crimson it was “virtually certain” that the Faculty’s size would reach 700 in this academic year.

At the time, he did not suggest that a hiring slowdown would be necessary to compensate for the faster-than-anticipated growth.

“[A]ll this came in the wake of an unusual year, and which mandated further analysis,” Kirby wrote in an e-mail.