Carlos A. Lopez, a graduate student and an advisee of Witzel's said the exchange marked a turning point in the department.

"I don't think that there were any issues that involved student when I first came to Harvard," Lopez said last week. "I knew before I came here that among the faculty in the department there were factions, but nothing that involved the students until last year."

Faculty Disputes

As tensions flared between graduate students and Witzel, disagreements among Sanskrit Department members continued raging.

When Witzel became chair of the department in 1987, he stepped into a department that was already highly political.

The department had been without a chair since 1984, and the search for a replacement was plagued with controversy, according to graduate students and Witzel.

The most explosive problem was the hiring of Enrica Garzilli as a lecturer on Sanskrit and Indian studies during the 1993-94 school year.

Last spring, Garzilli filed a lawsuit against Diana L. Eck, professor of comparative religion and of Indian Studies; Christoph J. Wolff, dean of the graduate school; Peter K. Bol, professor of Chinese history; and James W. Benson, former assistant professor of Sanskrit.

Garzilli alleged in the suit, which was amended and re-filed last week, that Eck and Benson made demeaning and harmful comments about her in departmental meeting and thus blocked her application to be a lecturer.

An exhibit in her complaint is a November 1993 letter from her attorney to Witzel, in which Witzel apologized for Benson's "uncollegial, disruptive, defamatory occurrences."

He wrote in a statement also filed in Garzilli's original lawsuit that the "defamed" Garzilli was a scholar of the highest ability, while Benson, the "defamer," had published noting but his dissertation and one article dealing with the same topic.

Witzel later withdrew the letter.

Benson now teaches at Oxford University and refused to comment about the incident.

One graduate student, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Benson left because he "could read the writing on the wall" and wanted to leave the department.

Eck, meanwhile, had not taught a course in Sanskrit since 1989, according to a 1994 letter from Witzel to Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Jeremy R. Knowles.