The University of Pennsylvania hired its first-full time director for its program for gay and lesbian faculty, staff, and students in 1989; Princeton tapped its first full-time LGBT student services coordinator in 2001; and in 2006, Yale hired a special assistant to the dean for LGBTQ affairs.

Lekus also commented on McCarthy’s Facebook post, “When it comes to queer issues, it seems clear that Harvard is ready to make a bold leap into the early 1990s.”

Page echoed Lekus’ sentiment. “There’s not that sense of Harvard standing up and saying, ‘We want to be the best, we want to be the poster child of making this a supportive place,’” he said in an interview.

‘NO ONE TO WORK WITH’

McCarthy, Lekus, and Page all said they think Harvard does not do enough to promote the academic study of LGBTQ culture and history.

In 2001, Epps and Heather K. Love ’91, then a lecturer on literature, launched an effort to push for the establishment of a committee on studies of gender and sexuality, which was incorporated in the existing women’s studies program in 2003.

Since then, professors in the renamed Committee on Degrees in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality have unsuccessfully clamored for full departmental status.

In 2009, Harvard established the F. O. Matthiessen Visiting Professorship of Gender and Sexuality, the country’s first endowed professorship in LGBTQ studies, funded by a $1.5 million grant from the Harvard Gay & Lesbian Caucus, an organization independent of the University.

This fall, Henry Abelove, an English professor emeritus at Wesleyan University, will teach two courses as the first recipient of the professorship.

But Lekus said he was not satisfied with this effort. “You have to wonder if this visiting scholarship absolves the University of actually hiring a senior scholar permanently in LGBTQ studies,” he said.

Even history professor Nancy Cott, who teaches History 1462: “History of Sexuality in Modern West,” said she does not consider herself an expert in LGBTQ history.

“It’s an area that I'm interested in and aware of,” said Cott. “But I would never call myself an LGBTQ specialist.” Instead, she describes herself as a historian of gender.

And though Harvard recently recruited LGBTQ scholar Michael Bronski from Dartmouth as a senior faculty member, his contract–though renewable–is not tenured.

FAS Dean of Arts and Humanities Diana Sorensen, who said that she and other University leaders highly value LGBTQ scholarship, pointed to the financial crisis and the subsequent hiring slowdown in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences to explain why there are not more tenured LGBTQ scholars at Harvard.