Not Simply Another Release

The news release was, at first glance, just one of many that Harvard churns out each week: Gerald M. McCue, professor of Architecture and Urban Design at the University of California at Berkeley, will come to Harvard in July as associate dean of the Design School and chairman of its Architecture Department.

On the Richter scale of undergraduate interest this news rates about 0.1 along with headline grabbers like balanced budgets at the Graduate School of Education.

But the announcement that McCue, has accepted the dual position is long-hoped-for news for the administration, students and faculty at the Graduate School of Design, particularly those in the uneasy Architecture Department.

However, the unrestrained praise for McCue, who is said to possess an exceptional combination of administrative, academic and professional experience, has not silenced rumblings of discontent that broke into the open at the GSD last month. These feelings have since returned to their customary sub-surface position.

Confirmation of McCue's widely rumored appointment may be a factor in the recent quiescence at the school. Several faculty said this week that critics of the GSD and its dean, Maurice D. Kilbridge, may be tempering their public words and actions so McCue will not arrive and immediately be forced to take sides in a polarized school.

Part of this reaction evolves out of the well-circulated rumor that McCue is being groomed to succeed Kilbridge. The dean has frequently been the subject of controversy during his six-and-one-half-year tenure.

The latest flare-up surrounding the one-time Business School professor occurred in March when statements Kilbridge reportedly made in Seattle, Wash., evoked critical student comment and a faculty call for a presidential resignation.

William F. Wilson, a third-year architecture student and member of the search committee that chose McCue, offers one of the firmest statements of this McCue-as-appointed-successor scenario: "You don't ask if McCue will be dean, but how long before he is dean." Harris sees Kilbridge gracefully stepping down when the school returns to a quiet equilibrium.

Although McCue is coming from a school that he portrays as the opposite of hierarchical Harvard ("We don't stand on titles," he says about Berkeley), he does seem aware of the intracacies of GSD politics and of the specific dangers involved in his appointment as both an administrator and departmental advocate.

"I do not see anyone as being under me," he says about his decanal position.

McCue has not mastered all of the GSD's ins and outs. Last month, shortly after he agreed to leave California the controversy over Kilbridge struck.

"I felt a little bit as if someone had hit me in the stomach," McCue said this week, adding that he had been under the impression that the spirit of the faculty and morale of the school were higher than three years ago, when McCue discouraged a potential offer of the department chairmanship.