Schelling Rejects State Dept. Post, Will Stay Here

Thomas C. Schelling, professor of Economics, will not leave Harvard next year to become a full-time consultant to the State Department.

"I gradually realized that the Department's organization was too complex to develop a system for programming in one year," Schelling said yesterday. He had received a leave of absence from the University for 1967-68 in order to devise techniques which could make more effective the Government's annual $5 billion in foreign aid.

He felt that he could drop his commitments here for only one year, but that there were severe limits on how much he could accomplish in such a short time.

Schelling also cited the difficulty of leaving his Government position in the September of an election year. The State Department does not have anyone to take his place. But Schelling will continue to advise the Department while a Faculty member and senior member of the Center for International Affairs.

He had already rented his Lexington home and found a residence in Washington before reversing his decision to take a year's leave of absence.

Although his duties had not yet been clearly defined, Schelling would have analyzed and recommended changes in the State's Department's budgetary process. The Department wanted to find better ways to relate program expenditures to foreign policy objectives.