Keeping Track...

Richard Pipes, Baird Professor of History, moved into the Executive Office Building in Washington Wednesday to start work on the National Security Council. Working under Reagan national security adviser Richard V. Allen, the Russian historian will head up the NSC's European section, which includes U.S.-Soviet relations.

Washington sources also said the reported decision by President Reagan to continue for the time being the embargo on selling grain to the Soviet Union is in line with Pipes' State Department transition report. Reagan sharply criticized former president Jimmy Carter during the campaign for imposing the embargo after the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, saying it unfairly penalized U.S. farmers. But Pipes wrote that there was no hurry to remove the freeze and recommended that it be kept in place at least for the first few months of the Reagan administration, a fellow member of the team said recently.

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Joseph S. Nye Jr., professor of Public Policy and Government, may become the next chairman of the Carnegie Institution's panel on "U.S. Security and the Future of Arms Control." Nye, one of about 25 members of the Democraticoriented group, said this week he had explored the possibility with current chairman Leslie Gelb, who is stepping down to rejoin the New York Times. Nye is in Washington today for an arms control conference sponsored by the Aspen Institute.

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Several Harvard faculty were in Washington last weekend as part of a three-day "Democratic Leadership Conference" sponsored by Democratic members of the House of Representatives to garner ideas on major issues. Ernest R. May, professor of History, and former State Department official Richard N. Cooper, Boas Professor of International Economics, spoke on foreign policy.

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Donald Fanger, chairman of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, said yesterday he was "more concretely optimistic than at any time in the recent past" that Stanlslaw Baranczak, who has been invited to join the department, will be allowed to leave Poland. Baranczak, a 33-year-old poet, was allowed to take a brief trip to Stockholm in December, but Polish authorities must still grant him a separate passport for him to begin the three-year associate professorship first offered by Harvard in 1978.

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Cambridge Mayor Francis H. Duehay '55 was last week named vice chairman of the National League of Cities Energy Steering committee. The NLC is an organization of city and town officials.

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Phyllis Keller, associate dean of the Faculty and the Faculty's equal employment opportunities officer, is taking time off from her University Hall duties this semester. Keller is spending this spring at Cambridge University.'