Robert J. Kiely

UN-STATELY, SLIM, Robert Kiely will have three offices in which to hang his green bookbag next year. His newest will be the Master's Office in Adams house, one he will occupy just about a year after he was given a University Hall office (which he will maintain next year) as associate dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences for undergraduate education. His oldest is an English professor's study, deep in the interior of Widener.

The 41-year-old professor, dean and master-designate doesn't seem to worry about the possibility of being stretched in too many directions at once by his university appointments. "Being a Master goes totally together with being a professor and a teacher," he says, and all his jobs will be concerned with the same purpose -- undergraduate education in the College.

Of course he'll have to cut down his teaching workload," one colleague in the English Department predicts of Kiely's near future. "And as Master, it may take more time than he expects; but then, maybe being a master doesn't take so much time as it used to."

While Robert Kiely lectures on novels at Harvard, Jana Moravkova Kiely (M.A. in Biology, '59) teaches genetics and introductory biology across the Charles at Newton College. The Mastership goes officially to Mr. Kiely alone, and Mrs. Kiely will continue to teach, but she plans to take a large part in over-seeing the House. "We want to do it together," he says.

BOTH OF Kiely's appointments by President Bok this year were generally received with more satisfaction than surprise. Until recently, he was best known among undergraduates as co-lecturer (with David Perkins) in a perennially over-subscribed course in "The Modern Period" of English and American literature, and maintained smaller followings with his courses "The 19th Century Novel" and "The Novel Since World War II." One of Kiely's Phi Gamma Delta brothers at Amherst in the early 50s remembers him from then with affection, as "everybody's favorite nice-guy;" those who know him now seem to hold the same kind of regard.

The hand Kiely has had in helping to form undergraduate educational policy goes back at least as far as 1968, when he began directing the Expository Writing program, revising it in the process. Soon after he left that post in 1970, he formed a student-faculty committee to investigate the needs of English concentrators, and eventually proposed a package of departmental requirement revisions (including a writing option) which was approved in full and implemented starting the next year. Now, as associate dean for Undergraduate Education, he has both an official role in proposing faculty legislation on undergraduate educational reform, and a close ear from his friend Derek Bok in matters of undergraduate policy.

Kiely made an explicit recognition of the conflicts between administrative order and academic idealism when he recently wrote, "a professor of English who becomes a dean is bound to become either a hypocrite or a subversive because what he wants is Athens and Florence -- and not in ten years."

Some of the student members on the Committee on Undergraduate Education (of which Kiely is chairman ex-officio) seem to think that he has avoided both hypocrisy and subversion in the CUE's work this year. This year the Committee has been working on problems of Freshman education; next year Kiely wants the focus to be on education in the Houses. Several of the members credit him with having resurrected the CUE this year from an early death-by-inertia. They like his ability to steer them away from proposals that are predictable losers in a faculty vote almost as much as they like his openmindedness. "He's definitely not a great radical innovator, but he clearly wants to get things done," says one CUE undergraduate. "He's an administration man -- not the same kind of gadfly as a Walzer or a Mendelsohn -- but not as objectionably so as some people either. He seems to feel that things can be changed around here."

IN 1956, three years after he graduated (magna) from Amherst, Robert Kiely was discharged from the Navy where he had been a communications officer and came to Harvard as a graduate student. His doctoral thesis, submitted in 1962, was titled "From Daydream to Modern Epic: A Study of the Adventure Fiction of Robert Louis Stevenson." With his PhD, he joined the junior faculty of the English Department, and published his first book, Robert Louis Stevenson and the Fiction of Adventure, three years later. "The question," wrote Kiely in his introduction, "is whether ... Stevenson has value for the mature reader. My object is to investigate that question and to suggest some of the reasons why I would answer it affirmatively."

In The Romantic Novel in England, published last year, Kiely went back to the late 18th and early 19th centuries to examine twelve examples of what is probably the most bizarre period of English novels to show how they made the way for a new order in English fiction.

The reasons for Kiely's success as a lecturer run deeper than the appeal of the novels on his reading lists. "He's always been interested in teaching," according to one professor who has watched him for many years. "In some ways his attitude toward writing is un-professional--I mean that in a complimentary sense. Although Kiely's very good in his field, he's been less interested in advancing his position in the field than in fulfilling his function as a teacher. More than most people his age, he's youthful--he's been able to maintain a sympathetic understanding of what it's like to be an undergraduate."

THE DRAWING of York Minister on the wall of Kiely's Widener office may have more than decorative value to its owner. The cathedral is one of the most impressive reminders of Catholic England, and the site of some of the best religious stonework of the Middle Ages. A director of the Harvard-Radcliffe Catholic Center, Kiely spent his sabbatical last year at Cambridge on a Prize Fellowship from the Society for Religion in Higher Education that allowed him to finish his second book and to continue his reading of religious literature. "I'm interested in the ways different writers have expressed the religious attitude in different forms--epic, drama, confessions, meditations, lyrical poetry, and theological works." This semester, he has been leading a Directed Study with one undergraduate in the theologies of Martin Buber and Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

Kiely has been thinking about teaching an Adams house course next year on religious writings as literature -- a project that could neatly merge his interest in religion as a basis for community with his interest in House-based education, his new position as Master, and his oldest job as teacher.