In 1979, a 25-year-old economics student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology named Ben S. Bernanke turned in his doctoral dissertation. In his acknowledgments, he thanked a faculty member, Peter A. Diamond, as one of four professors who "gave generously of their time, reading and discussing my work."
In April, President Obama nominated Mr. Diamond to the board of governors of the Federal Reserve, where his former student, Mr. Bernanke, has been chairman since 2006.
But under an arcane procedural rule, the Senate sent Mr. Diamond's nomination back to the White House on Thursday night before starting its summer recess. A leading Republican senator, Richard C. Shelby of Alabama, said that Mr. Diamond did not have sufficiently broad macroeconomic experience to help run the central bank.
The Senate did not turn back two other nominees, Janet L. Yellen and Sarah Bloom Raskin, to join the Fed's board, though the soonest either could be confirmed now is mid-September. Ms. Yellen, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, is in line to become vice chairwoman of the Fed, the No. 2 to Mr. Bernanke.
All three nominees were approved by the Senate Banking Committee, and there does not seem to be enough opposition to permanently block Mr. Diamond. "This is standard operating procedure in the Senate, and we expect that the president will renominate Peter Diamond," a White House official said of the delay.
Mr. Diamond, 70, joined the M.I.T. faculty in 1966 and is an authority on taxation, Social Security, pensions, Medicare, labor markets and behavioral economics. He is so well regarded there that the university commissioned a work by the composer John Harbison to commemorate his retirement in April.
As Mr. Shelby noted, Mr. Diamond is not a specialist in monetary economics — the control of the supply of credit and the setting of interest rates — which is the Fed's traditional purview. But of the five current governors of the Fed, only two, Mr. Bernanke and the vice chairman, Donald L. Kohn, are academic economists who specialize in monetary economics. The other three include a former community banker, a former Wall Street executive and a legal scholar.
One of the current nominees, Ms. Raskin, is not an economist at all, but a lawyer who oversees banking regulation in Maryland. Ms. Raskin once worked for the Senate Banking Committee, and the tradition of senatorial deference could help explain why her nomination was not held up while Mr. Diamond's was.
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