Seating the Scholars

Departments this year searched near and far--from Boston University (B.U.) across the river to Oxford University across the ocean--to fill vacancies in tenured Faculty.

Some departments, most notably Fine Arts, even looked to their own junior Faculty. Neil A. Levine, associate professor of Fine Arts and an expert in American architecture, was named a full professor.

The History Department, however, looked beyond its own and granted tenure to 35-year-old Simon M. Schama, a leading expert on Dutch history and a fellow and tutor in modern European history at Oxford.

The School of Public Health also went international by appointing Dr. John Cairns--a prominent molecular biologist and director of the Mill Hill Imperial Cancer Research Fund in London, England--to be a professor of Microbiology.

Another biologist, Donald H. Pfister, associate professor of Biology and a specialist in the study of fungi, will officially take over July 1 as curator of the Farlow Herbarium and Library, the largest university-associated collection of lower-order plants in the world. Pfister will also become a full professor in the Biology department.

The committee on degrees in History and Literature found a new chairman in Barbara K. Lewalski, an authority on 17th century literature. Currently an English professor at Brown University, Lewalski will not arrive here until the fall of 1982.

In April, modern poetry expert Helen Vendler, professor of English at B.U., accepted an offer to share her time between B.U. and Harvard. She will become a visiting professor of English here in the 1981-82 school year and will alternate semesters between the two schools.