Ruling over Radcliffe

When Matina S. Horner picked up this year's guide to Harvard and Radcliffe for perspective students a feeling of irritation crept over her. It was page 22 of the booklet that did it: "No longer separate in admissions, dormitories, classrooms, and the granting of diplomas, Radcliffe College is now in many ways more an idea than an institution." The guide is, after all, an official Harvard-Radcliffe publication and Horner had expected it to represent Radcliffe fairly.

Horner marched in to an Admissions Committee meeting that week and explained to them--as she had to literally hundreds of people over the past few years--that Radcliffe is a separate institution that owns $50 million worth of property, governs itself and draws up contracts with Harvard University. And she, Matina Souretis Horner, age 37, is that institution's duly appointed, independent president. Admissions committee members said afterwards that they found the meeting to be most informative.

The incident which occurred this month points to an uncomfortable theme in the Radcliffe administration: as Horner enters her fifth year as president and dean of Radcliffe, no one, not even Radcliffe's governing board, is sure what she is supposed to do and where the institution is supposed to be heading.

When the Radcliffe trustees appointed Horner to the college's presidency she was heralded by the press and national educational and women's organizations. She had written extensively on women in higher education--her fear-of-success hypothesis--which magazines gave wide and favorable coverage to. At 32, Radcliffe's youngest president was described as vivacious, articulate, charming and intellectual; she seemed the perfect figure to lead Radcliffe as it neared the end of its first 100 years.

Horner may not have had all the administrative credentials necessary to run the corporate affairs of Radcliffe--she now admits that "coming from an assistant professorship in Psychology is not the best preparation for leading a corporation"--but it was obvious to all concerned that with a little help she would catch on quickly. Her youth and inexperience only added to the ceremonial excitement.

Horner was to bring in a new era, one that would be carefully conditioned by a 1971 agreement between Harvard and Radcliffe that made undergraduate life entirely coeducational and coresidential but left Radcliffe as an independent entity on the corporate level--the so-called non-merger merger.

Because the agreement appeared to be the major step toward complete merger, many people at Harvard felt Horner was in a position of presiding over a dying empire that no longer had any purpose or direction.

As one Harvard dean recently put it, "Matina has had to spend a great deal of time maintaining the institution. Radcliffe is being swallowed and she's gotten the thankless task of seeing that the cat [Harvard] swallows it slowly, piece by piece."

Horner's position is, in the words of Classics Professor, long-time Lowell House master and recently retired trustee member Zeph Stewart, "the executive officer of an institution that's not yet sure of where it's going or what it should be doing. She came into a job which very well might disappear."

But Horner has a different view. As she sat in her spacious, cleanly decorated office in Fay House, Horner said last week that she accepted the post because it was a challenge. "The thing that attracted me to the job were the questions that affected the Harvard-Radcliffe relationship and a chance to really affect some of the issues, on a national level, that concern women and education in general.

"The challenge made me want to plunge appeal. Brown-Beasley--who holds four graduate degrees including a masters from Harvard in Regional Studies-East Asia--notes that Gibson holds a graduate degree in theology and is listed in the 1975 Harvard Alumni Directory as occupied in the ministry. Indeed, Gibson spent ten years in Harvard's campus ministry before beginning to work in Harvard's Admissions and Financial Aid office in 1966.

According to Champion, Gibson's work in admissions and on student employment and loans were major reasons behind the financial vice president's selection of Gibson to head the Office of Fiscal Services, an offshoot of Champion's 1973 reorganization of services once grouped in the comptroller's office. Gibson was not, Champion adds, a "theoretical systems guy," but he instead had "actually lived in an university environment and understood well" the problem of student financial aid.

Gibson has himself called attention to his interests and qualifications. In the Harvard Class of 1951 25th reunion book, he wrote:

...my greatest concern is still in the area of financial planning so that any qualified applicant can manage to attend Harvard. Just now that requires major attention to both federal and state programs, and Harvard has been a leader in student financial aid planning...Lately I have taken responsibility for various financial services around Harvard, and no one understands how such a thing could have happened. I'm the first to admit that my credentials aren't exactly typical.

In his position as director of the Office of Fiscal Services, Gibson supervises financial transactions within the University such as student loans, term bills and payroll. However, the office's responsibilities extend into other areas that do not clearly follow from its general mandate. These include shaping bursars card policy and managing the miscellaneous accounts receivable.

Not surprisingly, computers are an essential part of the office's operations, and when Champion reorganized the comptrolling functions, he ordered Gibson to obtain the approval of Wyatt, then director of OIT and of Financial Systems and Information Technology, before proceeding with any new computer systems. Champion said last week he gave this power to Wyatt "because he knows more about that than anyone else."

Wyatt's special veto power helped generate much of the conflict among Brown-Beasley, Gibson and OIT staffers before the August 3 Holyoke Center incident over the computer, and it has also become the hub of Brown-Beasley's conflict of interest charges. The 36-year-old Brown-Beasley, who worked at OIT for seven months before working for Gibson, objected to many of the recommendations on computer systems and applications made by Wyatt and his subordinates at OIT. Having received the order to submit to Wyatt in such areas, Gibson continued to defer to the Financial Systems director. Brown-Beasley was, Champion says, "asking Mr. Gibson to make decisions he thought were Mr. Gibson's, but that in fact were not."

Gibson alleged in his memo on the dismissal that "Within the office Michael frequently disparaged senior staff people within the University. Within Fiscal Services, I began to hear that he was talking about me behind my back and that the word most often quoted was his reverence to me as 'spineless."' Brown-Beasley does not deny that he called Gibson spineless; instead, he states that he did so not only to colleagues in Fiscal Services but also to Gibson's face during "cordial" conversations.

Conflict of interest

Brown-Beasley contends that Champion's appointment of OIT director Wyatt to fill the Financial Systems post created a conflict of interest in Wyatt's work. His interest in running OIT smoothly and on an even financial keel, Brown-Beasley suggests, was likely to influence the advice Wyatt and his staff would offer as head of Financial Systems (indeed, Wyatt's success on this front was cited this summer when he was named to the vice presidential post); In other words, in his second position Wyatt held a consulting veto power over decisions like whether or not to contract for work from OIT. From the Financial Systems post, Brown-Beasley adds, Wyatt could assure the OIT computer, analysts and programmers a steady stream of work. He would also be less likely to blow the whistle on projects that ran past deadlines and that thus afforded more pay for OIT.

Champion, along with Wyatt, dismisses the argument as "a goddamn fiction...the biggest crock I've ever heard of..." and offers a counter charge of sour grapes, suggesting that the conflict of interest is a creation of someone who is jealous of work going to another.

(Following the University's budgetary first commandment, "Each tub shall sitteth on its own bottom," the services of OIT consultants are structured on a fee for service basis, with analysts paid between $10 and $25 and hour according to Guy J. Ciannavei '55, manager of the computing center. OIT's predecessor, the computing center, violated this rule, running up a deficit of over $1 million so in 1972 the center went through a shake-up, with the dismissal of several top officers, the disposal of a large IBM computer, and the laying off of about half the center's staff. With a more carefully constructed rate structure, OIT has run in the black for the last several years, Ciannavei said last week. By July 1, the end of the last fiscal year, OIT had accumulated a surplus of approximately $200,000 which will be rolled over to the '77 year.)

Miscellaneous accounts receivable

Brown-Beasley's criticisms of Gibson, the two vice presidents and computer experts at OIT extend into specific computer systems for and applications at Fiscal Services. One of his most extensive differences with them is over the formation of the new on-line miscellaneous accounts receivable (MAR) system in Fiscal Services.

Brown-Beasley's criticism of the MAR system states the following:

That Gibson ordered the original, manual MAR system files dismantled, over the objections of his staff, months before the first attempt to automate the files had been tested, a violation of the traditional minimum overlap of several months;

That because the first system had failed, for over a year Fiscal Services staff members "repeatedly [had] to inform our clients that we had no way of knowing whether a specific invoice had been paid or whether a specific account was current or not;"

That the initial MAR system included a "patently unworkable" account labeling scheme using the first seven letters of a client's name that, from the outset, prevented successful implementation of a balance-forward monthly statement approach because "it guaranteed that charges to a series of different clients, say, General Dynamics, General Electric, General Motors, and General Telephone, would all, all have their charges appear on one and the same monthly statement..."

That the initial applications software (the programs for the computer system, as opposed to the machine itself, which is called the hardware) could not be salvaged after running over the deadline several months and cost thousands of dollars over the original contract cost;

That the second software system still is not operative four and one-half months after the deadline for its final testing because of careless execution of the contract with the software company and sloppy tailoring of the software program at OIT;

That the hardware for the system, a Datapoint 5500, is inadequate and was chosen in part because in early 1975 Wyatt overturned an OIT-staff recommendation on hardware for a payroll system and ordered use of a Datapoint machine.

Most of these allegations have not been responded to systematically because Gibson, and Kenneth E. Shostack and Edward W. Deehy, staff analysts at OIT, declined to comment on the Brown-Beasley case. However, Wyatt defended the choice of Datapoint hardware for the payroll system in an interview last week, stating that the OIT staff had recommended the Datapoint machine for a "distributed" computer system and a Hewlett-Packard computer for a centralized system. Wyatt chose the Datapoint machine, he said, in part because he believed the distributed system better fit into budgetarily decentralized Harvard. The Datapoint machine also afforded greater privacy, he added, and it could be leased, unlike the purchase-only Hewlett Packard. Wyatt also said that Datapoint "is looking quite good now," and that Harvard is considering taking out a long-term lease on it.

In a previous interview, Brown-Beasley painted a different picture of the OIT staff recommendations, charging that the staff group had proposed the Hewlett Packard machine and had been surprised by Wyatt's choice of the Datapoint hardware. Brown-Beasley argued that the Datapoint machine can be matched or bettered by the Hewlett-Packard and several others considered in the study.

The OIT study, obtained by The Crimson after the Wyatt interview with the approval of Wyatt and Ciannavei, appears to bear out Brown-Beasley's scenario: The report concludes that after a month's study the Hewlett-Packard machines is best for the payroll system, adding, "We have been very impressed with the quality and professionalism of their company's activities." There is no apparent discussion of centralized vs. distributive systems, and security is not one of the eight systems requirements listed.

Ciannavei and Robert A. Carroll, manager of systems and operations in the OIT computing center and head of the group that conducted the study, said last week that Wyatt chose the Datapoint machine after receiving promises of a systems software innovation whose availability was discussed in the report: "Our overall feeling about this system is that with the addition of the 5500 processor, it would be quite adequate to do the presently-defined task in Payroll. However, this system's capability to accommodate more terminals or additional processing functions gracefully would be in question."

Although Carroll said that "with all the input he (Wyatt) had, I concurred with his choice," an official at Hewlett-Packard involved in the payroll proposal said last week that Carroll and other members of the evaluating group had been "disappointed" by the decision. The official said that the company had received what was practically a letter of intent and was going to make the hardware order "momentarily" when it learned that Wyatt "virtually put forth an edict which declared a unilateral decision." Wyatt later explained to Hewlett-Packard, the official said, that although its machine had the necessary capability, which the Datapoint machine outline did not, he believed he could "make it do the job"--which the Hewlet-Packard official would require an efficiency rate of more than 100 per cent. An attempt to obtain Wyatt's additional comments on these claims was unsuccessful.

Carroll also said last week that Hewlett Packard had not felt it had been "done in." However, the Hewlett-Packard official contradicted this, declaring, "We were shocked, frankly." Carroll also denied that the Texas base of Datapoint had been an element in its choice by Wyatt, who was born in Texas and lived there until coming to work for Harvard.

I.D. cards and NAMAD

Brown-Beasley's allegations also include criticism of Gibson's decision to issue bursars cards last year to faculty members and other University officers with validation dates of October 1980. Because they were produced and then mailed through an outdated list, some of the so-called 10-80s were mailed to persons who had left the University the preceeding spring, such as Neiman Fellows. In addition, the five-year cards went to some who will leave the University before 1980, such as teaching fellows.

The difficulties raised by the mailing, which The Crimson revealed last fall, aroused representatives of Harvard's libraries, who feared that invalid cards would be used to remove books fraudulently. In his appeal document, Brown-Beasley wrote, "As an irreligious (negligent, careless, indifferent, lax) person as far as the bulk of your responsibilities in Fiscal Services goes, you've most likely never asked anyone at the libraries just what that particular irreligiosity...is going to cost us, but I did ask. And do you know what I was told? It will be years before the full impact can be assessed, if indeed ever."

Brown-Beasley also contends that the NAMAD retrieval system being developed to allow Fiscal Services faster access to records on students, employees and alumni is over a month and a half late. He also questions the work of OIT analyst Shostack on the system, alleging that his testing is an expensive waste of time. It was an August 3 disagreement between the two men, who worked together when Brown-Beasley was at OIT, that led to Brown-Beasley's dismissal.

The grievance procedure

Brown-Beasley's case is further complicated by several procedural questions he has raised about his dismissal and appeal. For one, he argues that Gibson violated regulations in the personnel manual that call for "progressive" discipline of employees, including a warning letter before suspension and a suspension before discharge. One section also reads: "An employee should not be disciplined or discharged in haste or anger. If a serious incident occurs which may warrant discharge, the employee should be suspended pending investigation."

Gibson apparently did not follow these steps in disciplining Brown-Beasley, who received neither a warning letter nor a suspension. However, Edward W. Powers, associate general counsel for employee relations, called attention last week to another clause in the manual that permits "discharge without prior warning or suspension" in the case of "very serious offenses, for example, serious dishonesty, including theft of University1