Goethals Named a Dean, May Teach New Soc Sci

George W. Goethals has been reappointed lecturer on Social Relations and named an assistant dean of Harvard College, Dean Ford announced yesterday.

Goethals was denied tenure by the Social Relations Department earlier this year and many students protested the decision, Ford said. He said the Department and the University recognized Goethals' outstanding qualities as a teacher and adviser and had been searching from the first for a way to keep him at Harvard.

"Tenure was impossible--it wasn't his fault it was denied to him," Ford said. He indicated that the department simply needed people in other areas of Social Relations more. Goethal's special field is the psychology of the adolescent.

In his position as assistant dean, Goethals will give special attention to the problems of transition from the freshman and sophomore year, and to the motivation for choices of fields of concentration.

Goethals said yesterday that College administrators are "very concerned with what's behind the individual's choice of a field of concentration." He said there was a feeling that such choices are often made capriciously, and that the counseling of students is not as effective as it might be.

Goethals suggested his examination of this problem might take the form of a formal study. Although he did not see the need for any sweeping changes in the counseling system, he pointed out the need for better coordination of advising in departments and in the Houses.

New Course

Goethals will be on sabbatical in Tunisia next year, but will return to his present teaching duties in September 1965. In addition to his regular course Social Relations 152, Psychology of Adolescence, he is working on plans for a new General Education course in the Social Sciences.

The proposed course would incorporate some of the material covered in his 1959-60 freshman seminar on the social sciences and the nature of man, Goethals explained; it would cover "a fairly broad range of materials in the social sciences."

He stressed, however, that the course was very much in the preliminary stage, and that whether or not it can be given depends on how the report of the Doty Committee is received. The course would require a somewhat broader definition of general education in the social sciences than is now in force, Goethals said.