Graduate students in the history department will present a petition to adminstrators this week after learning two of their most popular professors could be lured away to an Ivy League school.

Thirty-nine students have signed on to the letter asking the university to do everything it can to keep Profs. Steven Hahn and Stephanie McCurry at Northwestern.

“We also want to make sure that if it happens, we didn’t sit on our behinds,” said Aaron Astor, a third-year graduate student and one of the petition’s authors.

Although officials at neither school would confirm the talks, students said they were told by Hahn and McCurry that the pair might be leaving for the University of Pennsylvania. Hahn declined to comment.

The married couple came to NU in 1998 from the University of California-San Diego and have since been credited with putting the department on the map among Southern U.S. history scholars.

Their popularity extends beyond the graduate students, some of whom came to NU specificially to work with them. Hahn’s CTEC evaluations for his class History of the United States to 1865 include all high marks and plenty of praise.

“Not only did I never skip this class, but I even looked forward to it,” one student wrote.

Megan Glick, now in the first year of a Ph.D. program in American studies at Yale, said she became close to both Hahn and McCurry as an undergrad at NU — and even babysat their children.

“I feel like they were acadmically and emotionally extremely supportive of me and a big part of the reason I was able to do so well at Northwestern,” Glick said. “They’re very important to the depatment. But they need to make whatever choice is right for them, professionally and in their personal lives.”

Dana Weiner, a fourth-year graduate student, studied under McCurry as an undergraduate at UCSD. She came to NU a year after McCurry, who acts as her disertation adviser.

“It was a big selling point for the Northwestern department that they were here,” Weiner said.

Although McCurry told Weiner she would continue to advise her from Penn if she left, Weiner said other students may follow the professors east.

Some students expressed concern that Hahn and McCurry’s departure would widen a hole in the department. Prof. Adam Green, a 20th century U.S. historian, left for New York University last year.

But one member of the department said each professor’s professional decisions are personal and unique.

“I’m confident Northwestern’s administration will try very hard to keep them, because they’re such important members of our faculty,” Prof. Nancy MacLean said. “But at some point, there’s a limit to what an institution can do. It can’t grab people around the ankles and not let them go.”