A Dean for Harvard

Pressed to name a replacement for Harvard Dean McGeorge Bundy, President Nathan Pusey promised to make the appointment "sometime this side of the indefinite future." The time came last week.

Pusey named History Professor Franklin Lewis Ford, 41, to be Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, a job that Pusey himself has been doing--to a rising chorus of faculty criticism (TIME, May 25)--since Bundy went off to the New Frontier 18 months ago.

Ford is an appropriate successor to Bundy--young, bright, and equally adept at the conference table or the lecture platform. He is an able historian of Western Europe; his Strasbourg in Transition, 1648-1789 won the Harvard University Press faculty prize in 1958. Ford has also been active on several key Harvard committees. He served on the faculty committee on educational policy, was chairman of the 1960 faculty committee studying the Harvard admission system, and has been a trustee of Radcliffe since 1960.

Like Bundy, Franklin Ford is a longtime Harvard man who did not go to Harvard. He got his B.A. from the University of Minnesota, where his uncle, Guy Stanton Ford, was once president. After wartime service in the OSS, Ford went to Harvard for graduate work. Except for a year of teaching at Bennington and three years on research fellowships (including the past year at The Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford), he has been there ever since. In one relevant respect Ford is different from Bundy and two or three dozen other former Harvard facultymen: he seems to have no interest in going to Washington.

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