Ford Is Back In U Hall

Franklin L. Ford is going back to University Hall.

Ford, who served as acting dean of the Faculty from 1962 to 1969, got the call again last week as President Bok tapped him to serve in his old position until a permanent replacement for John T. Dunlop is selected.

Ford will handle the administrative duties of the deanship, while Harvey Brooks, dean of Engineering and Applied Physics, assumes its responsibilities regarding Faculty legislation.

Ford left University Hall under inauspicious circumstances. He was one of three Harvard deans forcibly ejected from University Hall by student occupiers, suffered a stroke a week later, and resigned his position.

In those troubled weeks, he was at the center of a swirling controversy. When critics of the Administration's decision to use police to clear University Hall charged that the action resembled the use of storm troopers, Ford responded, "Some now insist that 'storm troopers entered University Hall.' This is true, but they entered it at noon on Wednesday [the time of the occupation], not dawn of Thursday [the time of the bust]."

He was singled out for special criticism the day the occupation began when The Old Mole, a Cambridge-based radical newspaper, published a confidential letter taken from his files in which Ford implied that he would like to undermine a Faculty decision to strip ROTC of academic credit.

In the letter he termed the Faculty's resolution "a very badly framed, gratuitously unpleasant and basically confused pronouncement," and outlined several strategies the Corporation could follow to circumvent the Faculty's vote.

Today, however, Ford hopes for a quiet and uneventful tenure as acting dean. "If I thought this was going to be a period in which great difficult decisions would have to be made, I wouldn't have taken the post."

As opposed to Ford, Brooks has shunned the spotlight and is not very well known in the University community. He assisted Dunlop, maintaining a low profile and masterminding Faculty legislation from behind the scenes.

He will now move up to chairman of the Faculty Council but will retain his present title in the engineering department.

Bok is now free to give the time necessary to embark on an extensive process necessary to find a new dean. He plans to conduct extensive interviewing, and hopes to select a permanent replacement for Dunlop within three months.