Kleinman said the Faculty Council—the Faculty’s 18-member governing board, of which Kleinman is a member—had been told that “the commitment of resources has been made there and that the diversity initiative will not be seriously affected by this.”

“I frankly don’t know what that means,” Kleinman said. “I’ve heard the two things”—that diversity of the Faculty will continue to grow while new hires are slowed sharply—“and they seem to me to be jarringly different.”

While some department chairs, including Kleinman and Rosenblum, said they understood Kirby’s reasoning for slowing faculty growth for a year, none could envision the broader scope of the hiring slowdown.

“It’s hard to plan when you don’t know the long-term budget story,” Rosenblum said. “So I think the chairs are a bit mystified about where we’re going.”

Even so, Kleinman said that despite the surprise move to slow Faculty he growth, he felt Kirby “has explained it pretty well.”

“That is,” Kleinman said, “I’m not put out by it and I don’t think most of my colleagues are put out by it. We recognize that the speed at which we have increased the faculty is really astonishing when you stand away and look at it, and that it’s quite appropriate to have a period of slowdown.

“I don’t think, even at a wealthy institution like ours—a very wealthy institution—can you just proceed as if resources are not limited.”

—Staff writer Anton S. Troianovski can be reached at atroian@fas.harvard.edu.