Make Up For a Negligent Selection Process

NO DECISION that President Bok makes in the rest of his term is likely to have as great an impact on Harvard's undergraduates as his selection of the next dean of the faculty. From tenure choices to curriculum innovations, the style and the ideas of the number one administrator in University Hall will determine the type of education a Harvard student will receive in the 1980s.

It is inexcusable, then, that Bok has taken no public steps to solicit sentiments from anyone who has not yet received an A.B. When Henry Rosovsky announced that he was resigning from the post last May, administrators made noise about setting up a committee with the Undergraduate Council to ask for suggestions and perhaps even allow for student interviews with potential candidates. None of that has come about. The administration has not even made an effort to publicize the ongoing search which would at least allow student to comment.

There are several questions which potential deans should have to answer about student life before gaining power. Just as Rosovsky developed the Core Curriculum, his successor will still to deal with the serious objections to that system, and to the recent attempts to subvert its principles by stuffing the Core with every conceivable survey course. Rosovsky has only recently begun to emphasize the quality of teaching--from professors down to teaching fellows--and the next dean should decide from the start how much time he will take from internal Faculty disputes devote to classroom concerns, and to what extent he will insure good teaching in the push to get good names. In addition to these age-old concerns, Harvard, just as every other school in the country, is facing a technological revolution--which, if handled right, could harness these innovations to enhance an undergraduate education, and if handled poorly or ignored, could significantly diminish the worth of a Harvard diploma.

The dean's job is a complex one which must cater to many constituencies, of which the student body is but one, and perhaps the least influential. But that is no excuse for shutting that constituency out of the selection process as thoroughly as Bok has done. We can only hope that, out of the handful of professors mentioned as candidates, Bok chooses one who knows and cares enough about student concerns to do the job properly.