BOK, OR ROSOVSKY?

To the Editors of The Crimson:

At a meeting of the CHUL last Wednesday afternoon I entered the discussion of whether or not the meetings should be open to the press to say that I had never been misquoted by The Crimson. Your retaliation was swift, indeed. There were a number of embarrassing inaccuracies in your Thursday article reporting that my wife and I had informed the President that we would accept an offer to continue in a regular term as Co-Masters of Lowell House. First, the inclusion of "Mass Hall" and Mr. Bok's name in quotes in the second and third paragraphs as one who is "not willing to listen to the masters" and one who has "no faith in the House system" was inaccurate and incorrect. He has spent a significant amount of time with me this fall and I'm convinced that he is genuinely concerned about our role in Lowell House and the role of the Houses in undergraduate education. As to the rest of "Mass Hall" I would point out that Mr. Hall received me for a one hour meeting on ten minutes notice when an emergency arose in the House last month. In fact, the entire quote regarding who is not willing to listen to the Masters is not from me.

Although he can surely look after his own quotes, I feel that Dean Rosovsky could not have said that he had not met with the Masters yet this year. He had a long meeting with us two weeks ago in which problems of housing and the organization of his offices were frankly discussed.

I am also upset about the tone of the article, which makes Mary Lee and I seem some sort of martyrs for undergraduate education. It was only after concluding that time for our other interests would not be seriously infringed and that the positions would not be fiscally detrimental that we decided to accept an offer to continue.

It is a shame that these and other inaccuracies took up so much space that messages that I hoped to communicate at this opportunity were undeveloped or disrupted by the page break. They were: there is a disparity between the expectations of students for action by the Masters and our abilities to get things done. The organization of University Hall makes it often easier to work around it than with it. Dean Rosovsky and I disagree on the relative values of the departments and the Houses in improving undergraduate education. William H. Bossert   Acting Master of Lowell House   Gordon McKay Professor of   Applied Mathematics