In Brief...

The Faculty had expected a budget deficit of about $750,000; instead, it realized a surplus of $50,000 for the 1980-81 school year. This year's finish in the black--the fifth in a row--actually means that the Faculty broke even on its $60 million budget, Thomas O'Brien, the University's financial vice president, said this week. The surprisingly good performance resulted in part from conservation efforts lowering oil and electricity costs below expected levels. The $67 million budget for 1981-82 projects a $300,000 deficit and assumes a 20 per-cent reduction in energy consumption.

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A Harvard professor of Biology announced last week that an expedition he led during the summer had found the fossil remains of what is now thought to be the oldest mammal specimen in North America, Farish A. Jenkins Jr., who is also curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Museum of Comparative Zoology, said the jaw-bone fossil belongs to a mouse-sized creature that lived about 180 million years ago. "This is the most exciting find of my career because it stimulates our research of the earliest stages of mammalian history," Jenkins said in announcing the discovery of the one-cm.-long bone found in northeastern Arizona.

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Dr. Arif Hussain, a 30-year-old convicted rapist formerly affiliated with Harvard, was the center this week of a still-raging controversy. Hussain pleaded innocent to new charges that he raped two women while a resident at Waltham Hospital in 1978. Meanwhile, an official of the Buffalo, N.Y., hospital where Hussain worked from August 10 until the warrant for his arrested was issued last week, said letters of recommendation for Hussain written by Harvard-affiliated doctors did not mention Hussain's rape conviction. "The letters were amazing--they made him sound like he was next to Superman--and they definitely did not mention his past record," Thomas Sulivan, director of community relations for Buffalo Children's Hospital, said last week. The Harvard doctors who wrote the favorable recommendations and Medical School officials have declined to comment on the letters. Later in the week, the Massachusetts Medical Society said it would investigate the four doctors who wrote the favorable recommendations for Hussain, all but one of whom still work for Brigham and Women's Hospital. In addition, President Bok has asked the Medical School dean to have the school's faculty council investigate the matter and form a committee to draw up a policy for writing recommendations.