In a sharp and unexpected departure from a policy that has defined his tenure, Dean of the Faculty William C. Kirby formally announced last month that he is temporarily putting the brakes on the rapid growth of the Faculty.

While many professors had been aware of the move for at least several weeks, the broader picture surrounding the slowdown remains unclear, shrouded by what some professors have called a communication gap between University Hall and department chairs.

Each year since he started as dean in 2002, Kirby has taken the stage at Faculty meetings to commend departments and his staff for enabling the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) to grow at a rapid rate, outstripping the aims set forward early in his three-year tenure.

But last Tuesday, Kirby rose before the full Faculty again, to announce that its growth would be slowed, for now, “to allow our financial resources to catch up.”

“I’m not talking about a freeze of any kind,” Kirby said at the meeting, “but a more moderate plan of growth.”

According to a chart provided by University Hall (see chart at right), the administration is only projecting an increase from 700 to 703 senior and junior professors between January 2006 and January 2007.

This modest growth is an abrupt shift from the first three years of Kirby’s tenure, when faculty growth averaged just over 21 hires per year.

At the Faculty meeting, and in a letter to all of FAS on Sept. 23, Kirby referred to the faster-than-projected rate of Faculty growth over the last six years as the chief reason to bring expansion to a near-standstill.

In conversations with department chairs, however, Kirby and fellow deans are said to have pointed to other budgetary pressures—most notably, higher-than-expected construction costs around campus and the delay of the University-wide capital campaign—as necessitating a year of pause.

Yet according to many department heads, it is not the rationale given for the slowdown, but the sudden nature of the move, that is most vexing.

“A number of my colleagues didn’t hear a thing from University Hall until it was a couple of weeks ago, when we were told, ‘Hey, guess what, we’ve got a surprise,’” said Leonard van der Kuijp, the chair of the Sanskrit and Indian studies department. “There’s not a lot of transparency.”

A LONG SUMMER

Department chairs said they submitted proposals for new faculty searches to University Hall in the spring, expecting answers by July in order to advertise for open positions on academia’s usual timetable.

Given Kirby’s emphasis on growing the Faculty throughout his three-year tenure, chairs expected the great majority of their search requests to be approved, they said.

So it was with “a sense of fair optimism” that History department chair Andrew Gordon sent a letter proposing seven new faculty searches to University Hall in the spring, expecting an answer by mid-summer in order to advertise new posts and form committees to evaluate candidates.

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.

Eight department chairs interviewed by The Crimson said there were two key reasons, aside from the strain brought on by the rapid growth of the Faculty, behind the decision to put the brakes on Faculty expansion.d

One factor several chairs cited was the high cost of campus construction projects, including the Center for Government and International Studies (CGIS) and the North Yard science complex on Oxford Street.

“The cost of all the buildings that are going up on campus for the Faculty of Arts and Sciences has been extraordinarily more than expected,” said Gordon, the chair of the history department, calling the combination of more salaries to pay and the high bills on construction projects a “double crunch” on the budget.

University Hall did not provide any figures related to construction costs, nor would the administration respond to repeated requests for comment on budget projections.

In his e-mail, Kirby acknowledged that the building projects “have all been subject to the significant inflation of construction costs across the nation in recent years.”

“[B]ut they are not, by themselves, impediments to faculty growth,” he wrote.

The third reason offered for the slowdown, the department chairs said, is the delay of the University-wide capital campaign, brought on in part by the turmoil last spring over University President Lawrence H. Summers and the continuing debate over the Harvard College Curricular Review.

Kleinman, the anthropology chair, also referred to new high-cost initiatives across the University—such as the expansion plans for Allston and the Harvard Initiative for Global Health—that have committed much of the endowment. “So it’s not a surprise to me, and I don’t think it’s a surprise to most people, that we are going to slow down until a major campaign brings in new resources,” he said.

Yet to Kleinman and other chairs, it’s unclear when Faculty hiring will resume at the fast clip of previous years—despite Kirby’s statements that the Faculty is only headed for a one-year slowdown.

“What’s worrisome about those explanations is that they suggest more than a one-year postponement of growth,” Rosenblum said of the three reasons offered for the hiring slowdown—faculty costs, construction costs, and the capital campaign delay.

Kirby pointed out in an e-mail that faculty searches will still go on this year. He has authorized 42 new searches and the continuation of 36 from 2004-05, but did not say how many total searches took place across FAS last year.

But as Gordon noted, it’s a “crapshoot” whether or not the Faculty will actually expand again at the close of this academic year.

That depends, Gordon said, on the number of professors who leave the FAS—for reasons such as retirement or denial of tenure—and the percentage of candidates who accept their offer from Harvard.

LOOKING FORWARD

Equally ambiguous is the hiring slowdown’s effect on recent FAS initiatives to increase faculty diversity.

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.