Rosovsky Regrets Leaving Teaching To Take Administrative Responsibility

In taking over as dean of the Faculty, Henry Rosovsky continues the pattern of an academic and a member of the Faculty leading the teaching wing of the University.

Rosovsky, an expert on Japanese history and economics, wants to minimize his bureaucratic role as dean and remain an active member of the Economics Department.

Overseeing the Trinity

"I don't want to be overwhelmed with minor details in the deanship," Rosovsky said this morning. "The guts of this job is overseeing the long-term direction of the trinity--the Faculty, undergraduates, and graduate students."

Rosovsky harbors some doubts about leaving his academic pursuits, and plans to maintain his Littauer office and other contacts with the Department.

"One can't do a job like this too long," Rosovsky said. While he has no timetable for his length of tenure in the dean's office, he clearly doesn't want the job for longer than the six to eight years which Bok mentioned when he started the search for a permanent dean three months ago.

Rosovsky intends to follow President Bok's priorities which have recently turned towards undergraduate education. "I am not in favor of seeing Harvard as primarily a graduate school," he said, but he noted that he would not abandon the problems of graduate education.

Financial Problems

"Undergraduate education is in somewhat better shape now, I think, than graduate education, which faces morale and financial problems, plus the problem of having no permanent dean," he said. Edward T. Wilcox has been acting dean of the GSAS since September 1972.

In trying to cut down on the bureaucracy and making an easier access to innovations such as interdisciplinary concentrations, Rosovsky will largely be following his personal dictates.

"One of my clearest memories is trying to register the birth of my oldest daughter with the local ward office in Tokyo," he says. "They just couldn't understand that all babies born in Japan aren't born to Japanese parents"

Rosovsky's close personal interest in Japan is a result of 20 years of scholarship, five of which were spent in residence in Asia. In his office, he displays an eighteenth-century map of Japan and an 1860 drawing of the aal-time great Sumo wrestlers.

As the leader of the Faculty, Rosovsky sees some financial problems as the salaries of Harvard professors have slipped from first in the country to sixth. He will draw on his economic training and view many of the University's problems from a financial angle.

The dispersion of power which Rosovsky intends will be a major shift from the tight reins John T. Dunlop held over the Faculty until he moved to head the Cost of Living Council in January. Rosovsky also does not have the close personal ties to Bok which made Dunlop's job as dean an especially problematic one.

After getting a Harvard Ph.D. in 1959, Rosovsky taught at UCLA before coming back to join the Faculty as a professor of Economics in 1965.

In November 1971 he was offered the presidency of Brandeis University, but turned it down to remain at Harvard.

Rosovsky is fluent in Russian, French, German, and Japanese and has written three books on the Economics of Japan and Asia. He is co-author of a fourth book on Japanese economic growth in the twentieth century, which will be published in July.

While he says that student activism in the late sixties was improperly aimed at the universities as the nearest place to vent one's frustrations, he would not welcome students who are not interested in national affairs.

Rosovsky is not interested in making rules to govern students' lives, and he is equally uninterested in regulating the Faculty on issues such as outside consulting or faculty hiring.

"The opinions of students should be sought in making decisions, but the responsibility for education rests with the Faculty and that is not a position we can abdicate," Rosovsky says.