While You Were Away...

HELLO, RUDY TUESDAY

On July 1, shortly before noon, Neil L. Rudenstine showed up for the first day of work as the University's 26th president. His new colleagues say that Rudenstine has spent much of his first few months in office meeting people at Harvard and in the surrounding community. They add that daily life in Mass Hall has gone on for the most part as it was under former President Derek C. Bok, and that the new president has work habits--arrive early, stay late--similar to those of his predecessor.

RAINES REIGNS

In June, Franklin D. Raines '71 took over as president of the alumni-elected Board of Overseers. A former Rhodes scholar, Raines worked for the Carter administration and later for the investment banking firm of Lazard Freres. He currently serves as a financial consultant to Sharon Pratt Dixon, the new mayor of Washington, D.C.

AIDS CONFERENCE TO BE MOVED

An international AIDS conference originally to be held in Boston in May of 1992 will be relocated to another country, officials at the Harvard AIDS Institute announced in August. The move comes in reaction to a controversial federal ban on immigration of people affected with the AIDS virus. Harvard has already spent $1.5 million in organizing the conference.

HE HAS A DREAM

Ronald Quincy, former presidential assistant for affirmative action, left Harvard this summer to become the first executive director of the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change, in Atlanta.

SPOTS AND NOTS

Anna Chave received a finding of no discrimination in response to her complaint that she was unfairly denied tenure. Chave, a popular teacher and controversial modern art scholar, had taken the unusual step of filing a complaint over her tenure case with the University's governing boards.

THE OTHER SHOE DROPS

K. Anthony Appia accepted a tenured position in the Afro-American Studies Department. Appia, whose scholarship is in philosophy and literature, has been a faithful right-hand person to new Afro-Am chair Henry L. Gates, Jr. He and Gates were friends in college and have since taught together at Yale, Cornell and Duke.

Afro-American Studies at Harvard is on the move--literally. The department is now occupying new quarters at 1430 Mass Ave.

SO IT'S NOT A CEDAR-LINED CLOSET...

When Harvard conducted an independent audit and voluntarily withdrew $500,000 in overhead reimbursements from the government last spring, it avoided much of the bad publicity over indirect costs received by Stanford University that led to the resignation of Stanford president Donald Kennedy '52.

In mid-July, however, the General Accounting Office found some $54,000 in further questionable expenditures, including money spent on shuttle bus service, athletic facilities and recruiting a professor.

And the Washington Post reported over the summer that thousands of dollars in withdrawn overhead reimbursements had been tagged for Bok's off-campus home and his official car.

FUNDRAISING FOLLIES

As the Medical School wound down its recent major fundraising campaign this summer, the Law School kicked off its biggest campaign ever. Over the course of the next five years, Law School officials hope to raise $150 million. In what one Law School official called an "important milestone for legal education," the campaign has received several hefty donations from well-known law firms.

SHE'S IN THE MONEY

Radcliffe College has named a new principal financial officer. Nancy Dunn, a former Kennedy School of Government administrator, will oversee financial planning for the college, which has a $104 million endowment.

QUIT NOW: A ONE-TIME OFFER

In the interests of budget-trimming, the University has proposed a voluntary early-retirement program for about 870 of its non-faculty and hourly employees. Under the plan, workers 55 or older with 10 or more years of service can retire this year and receive pension benefits as if they were five years older and had five more years service.

Vice President for Finance Robert Scott says that Harvard is unlikely to continue offering this program in the future. "This is a one-time offer," he says.

CRYING DEWOLFE

Harvard's new DeWolfe St. housing complex opened in August after over a year of construction. The completion of the project means that students and junior faculty can begin moving into their rooms for next year, and also means the end of the construction noise that residents of nearby Leverett House have been complaining about for the last year.

CASH FOR CHROMOSOMES

Harvard received a $6 million grant from the National Institutes of Health for work that will form part of the National Human Genome Project, a 15-year, $3 billion effort to decipher the sequence of the billions of "letters" in the human genetic code. Researchers have already gone to work in the spanking-new Harvard Genome Laboratory, located in the basement of the Biological Laboratories.