Life After Rosovsky

A DEAN OF THE FACULTY, Henry Rosovsky has said, must see himself as "the custodian of a national treasure," and over the past 10 years, custodian Rosovsky has generally preserved that treasure well. Today's Faculty, thanks largely to the dean, is more harmonious, more solvent and more purposeful than the one he inherited in 1973. The news last week that Rosovsky will step down next June does more than prompt and assessment of the dean's successes and failures. It also, in light to Rosovsky's great impact in the University's second most powerful post, underscores the need for a careful, open and wide-ranging search for a successor.

Many of Rosovsky's tangible successes are well known closing the yawning budget deficits of the mid-1970s, introducing long range financial planning, preserving aid-blind admissions, and bringing record numbers of women and minority scholars to Harvard in both tenured and non-tenured positions. Other successes are less quantifiable but equally important. More than any other recent dean, Rosovsky has focused his attention on undergraduate life, making curriculum a priority, encouraging improved teaching through the Danforth Center, and initiating the wholesale review of undergraduate academic regulations that continues today. Many Faculty members and officials credit him, too, with helping depoliticize the deanship, with being a scrupulously fair administrator and with having a gut-level commitment to Harvard that has led him to turn down the presidencies of four other University including Yale and the University of Chicago.

Yet Rosovsky has made his share of mistakes, and it will be his successor's responsibility to pick up the pieces. The Core Curriculum remains a flawed innovation, one that often seems a roadblock to the intellectual broadening and deepening that it professes to achieve. The Faculty Council, the closed executive committee of the Faculty which Rosovsky chairs, has often seemed grossly insensitive to the legitimate concerns of racial minorities, women, and gay students--its rejection of a policy of nondiscrimination for gays being an obvious example. Rosovsky has also done much to perpetuate the flaws in Harvard's tenure process--its tendency to ignore all but old and well-established scholars who are frequently unavailable, its refusal to consider teaching ability as a criterion in senior faculty hiring, and its consistent rejection of promising junior professors whom Harvard would sometimes do well to gamble on, Finally, an unfortunate side effect of Rosovsky's centralized decision-making style has been the demotion of the Faculty as a whole from a lively forum for high-level debate to a rubber stamp for Faculty Council decisions.

It is with Rosovsky's shortcomings that the search for a successor should start. President Bok should actively seek the advice of undergraduates--not just Undergraduate Council leaders, but other students as well--who can fill Bok in on their curricular and other grievances. He should meet, too, with minority, women and gay students, and others that have voted dissatisfaction with the responsiveness of the Faculty to their concerns. And he should very carefully listen to junior professors, for the policies of Rosovsky's successor could well determine whether these young scholars will become Harvard's future or Harvard's shame.

Henry Rosovsky has served Harvard well. No doubt he will continue to do so--next year, as he ties up loose ends, and afterwards, as he returns to the academia he so plainly misses. So it is not with disrespect that we say that Derek Bok, in looking for a replacement for Henry Rosovsky, should not be looking for another Henry Rosovsky. The dean has been a dedicated curator, but his successor should have an interest in the parts of Harvard's "national treasure" that Rosovsky neglected to polish.