Gelbart said that the department does provide alternate advisers when a student's primary adviser takes a leave. He attributed the student dissatisfaction expressed in the poll to "bad publicity" about the new adviser.

Julia A. Porotova '99, a psychology concentrator with a special interest in organizational psychology, was one of many left searching after her would-be thesis adviser took a leave.

"There are only two professors who do what I'm interested in, as far as I'm aware," she says. "When one of them is on sabbatical, it kind of reduces my options."

Porotova ended up working with one of the professor's graduate students.

Faculty members taking leaves of absence may also lead to the over-burdening of other Faculty members. The head tutor or other senior Faculty member may be forced to take on a number of other advisees.

"I am advising five first-year graduate students this year who will be working on modern European/British history, although only one or two of them will probably be my advisees long-term," Blackbourn said.

The absence of advisers may cause students to feel displaced and Faculty to take on extra responsibilities, but Lewis believes this advising glitch can be fixed more quickly than others.

"This problem should be one of the easier ones to resolve, since Faculty leaves are invariably known months in advance," Lewis said.

In that case, administrators should be even better prepared to deal with another long-term problem that Heimert calls "the bigger question."

"I should have left for retirement years ago," he says, "and Bercovitch will be up for retirement in four or five years. What is the University doing to find a tenured replacement in the area of colonial literature?