Rebecca L. Krug, a popular assistant professor of English and American Literature and Language, will leave Harvard at the end of the school year to accept a tenure track position at the University of Minnesota.

The English department has consistently struggled with a high turnover rate among junior Faculty members, who are rarely tenured within the department.

And Krug--an expert on late medieval studies whose book on medieval women's literacy will be published soon--said she believes the department ought to tenure more junior Faculty.

"I don't think the solution is to tenure one person every 13 years but to commit to tenuring junior people as other institutions do," she said.

"I loved teaching here and had fabulous colleagues in medieval studies," she added. "Although there are serious structural problems with the tenure situation, my personal experience at Harvard has been very positive aside from some departmental concerns."

At the University of Minnesota, Krug will teach classes on medieval drama, as well as Minnesota's version of English 10a: "Major British Writers I," the first basic course required of all English concentrators.

Members of her Harvard classes said they will miss an instructor who brought unusual enthusiasm to an esoteric subject.

"I never liked medieval literature. I'm still not sure that I do. But for a semester, Becky convinced me that it was the most interesting, exciting thing in the world," said Sonja Nikkila '02, an English concentrator. "And I was happy to be convinced--her class was one of the best things that ever happened to me."