According to Gates, “The decision not to promote Marcyliena Morgan had a chain reaction, leading to the departures of Lawrence Bobo and Michael Dawson.”

Adrift at Harvard, Morgan accepted a tenure offer from Stanford, and Bobo, who is her husband, decided to leave with her. The former Tishman and Diker professor of sociology and of African and African American studies, Bobo was one of the University’s premier sociologists and a member of the prestigious National Academy of Sciences. He also served as acting chair of Af Am while Gates was on leave during the 2003-2004 academic year.

By the end of the fall semester, Dawson, a former professor of government and of African and African American studies who came to Harvard primarily to work alongside Bobo, announced his intention to return to the University of Chicago after only three years at Harvard.

Now the department may be on the verge of losing yet another professor.

Shaw’s permanent departure is not definite. She has not yet resigned from her post at Harvard, and will likely return if Penn does not offer her tenure next year.

But she says if Penn does offer her tenure—and she hopes it will—she would accept the offer.

And Gates says that Harvard cannot match any tenure offer made by Penn.

“We would expect a candidate in her field to have published considerably more than she has published so far. What Penn has done might be called a preemptive strike, and I applaud them for their cleverness, but we have very vigorous standards for promotion from within, and a crucial aspect of those standards is a candidate’s record,” Gates says.

The inability of Morgan and Shaw to receive tenure at Harvard has played out against the backdrop of broader faculty concerns with gender diversity and the decline in tenure offers made to women since Summers became president.

Shaw, who has been at Harvard for five years, says that while she supports the recent recommendations of the two task forces on women—which are geared toward recruiting and retaining female and minority professors—those efforts do little to help untenured professors already within Harvard’s ranks. Shaw says many faculty have come to call these professors the “lost generation.”

“Quite frankly, for many of my colleagues, it is too little, too late,” Shaw writes in an e-mail. “It is notable that most of our peer institutions, including the University of Pennsylvania...have long had more impressive records on the hiring, promotion, and intellectual support of women scholars than has Harvard.”

Dean of the Faculty William C. Kirby denies that a “lost generation” exists, saying that Harvard has long demonstrated a commitment to gender diversity.

“I think there are large areas of change in the past years that have made a big difference in terms of the number of appointments” of women professors, he says.

Summers played a very public role in West’s 2002 departure, and now some professors pin blame on him for the losses of Bobo, Morgan, West, and Shaw.

“It is probably fair to assume that at least some, and perhaps most, of these departures would not have taken place under [his predecessor] Neil Rudenstine’s presidency,” Cabot Professor of English Literature and of African and African American Studies Werner Sollors writes in an e-mail.