HUC Favors Non-Faculty House Master

The Harvard Undregraduate Council last night recommended to President Pusey and Dean Ford the appointment of non-Faculty members as House Masters.

The HUC unanimously approved the policy report at a meeting Monday night. Author John Hersey's appointment last spring as Master of Pierson College at Yale was the focal point of the report. Daniel C. Goldfarb Jr. '66, president of the HUC, and Steve W. Simpson '66, chairman of the Dunster House Committee, discussed the appointment with Yale students, administrators, faculty members, and Hersey himself.

According to the report, they went to Yale "with the knowledge that Harvard will have several masterships open in the near future, and these positions are not easy ones to fill." (John M. Bullitt '43 will resign as Master of Quincy House, and the new tenth House will also need a Master.)

Proponents of the plan say there has been no decrease in student-faculty contact at Pierson College. Assistants of Kingman Brewster, President of Yale, did not feel the Hersey appointment will affect faculty acceptance of masterships in the future.

The HUC stressed that House Masters should be chosen primarily from the Harvard faculty, but if the right non-academic person were available, he should be appointed to give "further breadth and vitality" to the House system.

The report to the Administration includes excerpts from Hersey's address at his installation as Master. Hersey said the non-academic man in the academic world "has no reason to hide his astonishment at the inertias of a great University. He can afford the easy stead-fastness of one who does not want or need anything from the institution, least of all those terrifying velvet handcuffs known as tenure."

"He will not," Hersey continued, "be swept up in the jealousies and power struggles of the faculty. He can be, he has to be--for he has nothing to lose otherwise but his self-respect--a champion of innovation and experimentation."