Emerging from UHall's backstage

When John B. Fox Jr. '59 moved down the University Hall stairs from his cramped third floor office to the spacious rooms of the College dean this summer, few people outside University Hall knew what to expect of him. As assistant dean for academic administration, Fox had generally been active only behind the scenes, and while he had a reputation for tending toward the conservative end of the spectrum of University Hall administrators, it was hard to tell what kind of role he would play once he moved out into the open.

Three months later, it isn't much clearer. Fox is so new to his position that last week his hallway was still full of cardboard boxes, and he was still talking about refurnishing the office his predecessor had vacated.

But Fox has begun to put together a set of goals for his tenure as dean of the College that, while ambitious, could change the entire character of that position: presently the dean is no more than a beefed-up assistant to Rosovsky, but Fox hopes to make his new office "a place for people to bring ideas about the College, a place where the buck stops."

His desire to make his role more visible, stems, he says, from a belief that the College is the victim of a series of centrifugal forces that have obscured some of its traditional goals. Echoing part of Dean Rosovsky's 1974 letter to the Faculty on undergraduate education, Fox says he believes that increased diversity of student and faculty interests, while adding strength to the kind of education offered to undergraduates, has fragmented a community once built around common academic involvement. The main goal of the College dean and of other undergraduate advisors should be, he suggests, to recreate as much as is possible the sense of community he believes was lost in the turmoil of the late '60s, without sacrificing the positive aspects of greater diversity.

That goal is probably unachievable, Fox says, but he believes that if it is possible to reestablish a community spirit in any large university of the '70s, it is possible at Harvard, imbued as it is with both tradition and talent. Fox says he hopes to establish procedures that will bring all the people concerned with administering undergraduates' lives outside their academic concerns, in touch with each other, using the College dean's office as a meeting ground. "I don't wish to interfere with independent entities," Fox says, "but I do want them to be structurally part of the College."

Before anyone can start talking about even minor changes in the College's administrative structure, however, the issue of housing policies has to be resolved. The two-year debate over whether all students should live in four-year Houses, in three-year Houses, or under no House system at all has worn down just about everyone involved to a point of complete uninterest with the whole question, but so far no one has come up with a satisfactory compromise. Fox says he is unhappy with the idea of continuing to run two separate systems--four-year Houses at the Quad and three-year River Houses--and considers establishing a coherent policy as soon as possible essential.

Like everyone else, Fox says he doesn't know what the final resolution will be, but because he believes major architectural changes are financially out of the picture (eliminating a proposal that would have turned the Yard into several four-year Houses), he says he leans right now toward a three-year House system. He has been meeting with House masters all summer to discuss the issue and hopes to have hammered out a decision by Christmas. "And if we can't get everyone to agree," he says, "well, the tensions of disagreement aren't necessarily a bad thing."

It is this kind of attitude toward policy making that led one UHall administrator to remark last week that Fox appears likely to be firmer and more decisive than his predecessor, Charles P. Whitlock. Now associate dean of the Faculty, Whitlock says he thinks the College dean should become a more autonomous unit, regaining the strength the office had up until the early '50s. The more House masters and the heads of other College areas turn to the College dean, he points out, the greater the time Dean Rosovsky makes it clear he is looking for that kind of independence in the College dean, saying, "Naturally I would like all the administrators around me to be autonomous, to work as independently of me as possible."

One of Fox's first real steps in his new office came three weeks ago, when he appointed Alberta Arthurs acting dean of freshmen. Like most of the participants in this summer's UHall shuffle, Arthurs has been in the administration for some time. Most recently she was dean of undergraduate affairs, a position she was given last year when her old position, dean of Radcliffe admissions, was wiped out in the merger of the admissions office. Arthurs says she is still too new to the position F. Skiddy von Stade filled for the last 27 years to know exactly what she will do with the job, but she says it is certainly "less mysterious and much more interesting" than her position last year, which was nebulous at best.

In line with his philosophy of turning his office into a clearing house, Fox has already appointed an assistant dean, Ann B. Spence, to oversee budgets and to act as a liaison between separate College areas. At present, Fox has specific control over money allocated for anything concerning Houses and dormitories except their physical upkeep, and his jurisdiction may eventually be expanded to include final approval of the budgets of other non-academic undergraduate programs. Fox denies that such a move would be a centralization of authority; rather, he considers it essential to increasing the awareness of College administrators that their work must be conducted within the context of the whole College. Final approval of the budget, Fox suggests would only be a way for him to ensure that people understand where the community's priorities lie each time the budget is drawn up.

Spence, the new assistant dean, will also be responsible for a job that used to belong to Bruce Collier, determining house occupancy levels. That task put Collier at the center of a controversy last spring, when Mather House residents felt they were being unfairly crowded, and Collier's move this summer to the financial office of the Faculty came as no great surprise. A budget analyst who received a Stanford MBA this spring (after working several years in the Radcliffe career planning office and in what is now the Office of Graduate Career Planning). Spence has not yet been introduced to Collier's crowding formula. She says she understands it is so complicated no one was willing to explain it before they were sure she would take the job.

But the part of Spence's position that has yet to emerge clearly is her role as a liaison between House masters and the College dean. In the past, Whitlock says, masters have been free to turn wherever they wished for assistance--which in many cases led them directly to Dean Rosovsky. But a draft report of the dean's Task Force on Undergraduate Life suggested a more identifiable place for masters to go to for information and aid, as a way to more efficiently utilize House resources and to erase inequities between House facilities.

All these administrative changes tend to obscure one aspect of the College dean's office that has traditionally been important, that of counselling students whose problems were, for one reason or another, outside their masters' province. While Fox says he does not expect that aspect of his office to disappear, he does not consider himself a good enough counselor to play that role himself. So although he hopes to improve the lines of communication between undergraduates and UHall, Fox will rely on others in his office to help students with personal problems. He says he doesn't know who that counselor will be--possibly Archie C. Epps III, dean of students, although Fox says he really isn't sure--but he plans to insure that someone is prepared to deal with individual students who come to his office.

But none of Fox's plans for 4 University Hall have really jelled yet, and no one in the administration is willing to hazard a judgment on how they will work out. Most observers agree that the dean's office is likely to play a very different role in the College over the next year, but Fox himself remains somewhat enigmatic. House masters who met with him over the summer to begin discussing housing policy and possible improvements in the College came away with positive impressions, as indicated by adjectives such as, "open-minded," "decisive," and "courageous," but all recognize that these remain nothing more substantial than impressions. Since Fox's generally reserved manner is not likely to change, he probably won't give out many hints of his plans, and the College will simply have to wait for him to take some definite action before it can reach any conclusions about its new dean.

And off in the not-very-dim shadows, of course, there is always Dean Rosovsky, who has proven himself perfectly willing to move administrators who don't fulfill the role he expects of them. Whitlock describes Rosovsky's experimentation with administrative personnel as similar to a civil service model, under which career administrators are moved around until they find a place that fits their capabilities. In addition, Rosovsky's conviction that administrators should be moved around so they don't get stale adds a sense of impermanency to any stage of University Hall's organization--Arthurs, for example, now holds her third title in four years, and even now she is only an acting dean. Francis M. Pipkin, associate dean of the Faculty for the Colleges--Fox's counterpart in the academic sphere--leaves UHall for the Physics Department in June, and Rosovsky says he plans to spend a fair amount of time this fall seeking a replacement for Pipkin and for Peter S. McKinney, now acting dean of the graduate school. With that kind of presence in the wings, Fox is quite likely to move slowly for a while, as he gets used to being an actor on the more visible part of the UHall stage