Picking Deans at Harvard

Harvard President Nathan Pusey has been known to sigh in private about the amount of time he must spend picking new deans for his university. There are nine major deans in all, and there have been twelve changes since Pusey took over in 1953.

After Law Dean Erwin Griswold resigned last fall to become U.S. Solicitor General, Pusey asked all 80 members of the law faculty for suggestions on what directions the school should take and who Griswold's successor should be. Pusey also had to sift through proposals from alumni, consulted with fellow members of the Harvard Corporation, polled the 30-man board of overseers by telephone and telegraph. He followed the same procedure in seeking a Divinity School dean to replace retiring Samuel H. Miller.

With understandable relief and considerable pride, Pusey last week announced the results of his two most recent dean hunts. Succeeding Griswold at the Law School is Derek Curtis Bok, 37, son of a former Pennsylvania Supreme Court Justice, an authority on labor law and a member of the university's faculty since 1958. Co-author (with Harvard's Archibald Cox) of the classic textbook on labor law, Bok has had experience as a strike mediator and is well liked by his students, who consider him less frostily distant than Griswold. Heading the Divinity School is Stockholm-born Krister Stendahl, 46, an ordained Lutheran minister who is regarded as one of the top New Testament scholars in the U.S. Admired by his students as a charismatic teacher, Stendahl was one of three leading candidates last year for the vacant post of primate in Sweden's state church.

The two appointments reflect Pusey's current interest in relating Harvard's teaching more closely to contemporary social problems. Bok sees a need for the Law School to draw more heavily upon the skills of other departments within the university, then apply their combined knowledge to such issues as racial discrimination, aid to the poor and labor relations. Similarly, Stendahl feels that the Divinity School curriculum should reflect more of the church's concern with the eradication of social ills. By coincidence, Bok and Stendahl are good personal friends and have a common interest in things Swedish: Bok's wife is the daughter of Sweden's great sociologist, Gunnar Myrdal.

As it happens, Pusey's relief at finding two new deans was short-lived. With the resignation last week of John Coolidge as director of Harvard's Fogg Art Museum, he must get back on the telephone, scan the country, solicit letters of recommendation for a man to head the country's best university museum.

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