Dear Mr. Spence

DEAR PROFESSOR SPENCE.

Congratulations once again on your appointment to the prestigious position of Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. You must be getting a little nervous, what with Rosovsky finally stepping down this month.

You are stepping into office at is propitious time for change--if it's change you want--since Dean Rosovsky has already cleared the deck of some difficult issues. The hoopla over the Core Curriculum has finally calmed down, and the program is firmly in place. After years of souring deficits, the Faculty budget is back to equilibrium and seems to have weathered the worst of this decade's inflation. During his last year in office, Rosovsky turned attention to a number of important long-range issues that you would be wise to pursue vigorously--undergraduate teaching, the status of junior faculty, and computers.

Just last month, in his annual report, Rosovsky took up the theme of undergraduate instruction. Rosovsky gives Harvard a fairly clean bill of health. He cites statistics showing that more than half of undergraduate enrollments are in courses taught by senior faculty, that much contact with faculty comes in small courses of less than 40, and that students by and large like their courses here. He then says this data is evidence of Harvard's "outstanding" undergraduate education.

Rosovsky's report was somewhat reassuring--Harvard's myths were never as bad as its critics implied--but you should not view this as a be-all-and-end-all of what can be done for undergraduate education here. There are still too many bad section leaders, too many uncaring professors in the stereotypical mold. You should think about pressuring some of these departments that provide students with little guidance and poor tutorial instruction, to make reforms. And why not tinker with the Core to let students have the option of more survey courses and departmental prerequisites?

Similarly, you might want to build on Rosovsky's initial, unfinished exploration of the status and health of the junior faculty here. Rosovsky has commissioned a report to find out just how correct is the image of the malcontent assistant professor who hasn't a shot in the world at tenure. Is the system fair? And what can Harvard do to make junior faculty, who bear such a large portion of the teaching load here, feel more comfortable? Harvard can also take steps to attract even better junior faculty in the first place. Such a move would help to raise the low number of internal promotions that survive Harvard's tenure process--a process that has been described as tantamount to the canonization of a saint.

Because of the relentless pace of technogical advances, a final area of exploration will no doubt be issues relating to computers. The last year alone has seen a tremendous surge in the computer facilities here, as well as a proliferation of opportunities for students to obtain cut-rate hardware from companies eager to cultivate the potentially lucrative Harvard market. Harvard is trying, slowly, to come to grips with a technology that has thus far outstripped educators' abilities to capitalize on it fully.

You will need to do some hard thinking, along with some of your lieutenants, as to how to better guide students in the use of these machines. If the computer is truly going to become as necessary as the typewriter, then Harvard is going to have to be able to help students choose between an Apple, DEC, or IBM personal computer. It should figure out how these can better be integrated into actual coursework. And, most important, the University must insure that poorer students will have the same access to the new technology as their richer colleagues, or else Harvard's policy of aid-blind admissions won't be worth the piece of paper it is written on.

No doubt many of these issues are already on your mind as you prepare to take charge. No doubt, so too are a number of topics ranging from the state of the budget to the state of the Graduate School to the ever-thorny problem of finding more minorities and women to fill Harvard's chairs. But it is still essential that you make time for undergraduate concerns and put the power of your office behind the reforms you wish to make. Otherwise, you may well get lost in the maze of everyday responsibilities that will undoubtedly take up much of your time. Walk out into the Yard every now and then from your University Hall abode: the undergraduate air could be invigorating.