Search for Graduate Student Continues

A year ago, Joan L. Webster could not go home to New Jersey for a Thanksgiving visit with her family. Then a first-year student in the Graduate School of Design (GSD). She was besieged with work and decided to stay in Cambridge to avoid falling behind in her studies.

Webster was disappointed at not being able to spend the holiday at home. friends said yesterday, so this year she "knocked herself out" to complete all of her work before the Thanksgiving break.

She finished an 11-week architectural project and presented it in class on the Monday before Thanksgiving, and received a "tremendous response" from her fellow students. The project went so well, her father said, that "Joan was really high, feeling great about it the whole time she was home.

Webster flew back to Boston on the Saturday night after Thanksgiving because she had promised two classmates that she would be back Sunday afternoon to discuss their next School of Design assignment.

"I wish now that she hadn't rushed back," David Duncan, a third-year GSD student and one of Webster's closest friends, said yesterday. "But she was very dedicated, and it was a typical thing for her to do."

Webster was officially reported missing last Tuesday, after several worried friends called her parents in Glen Ridge, New Jersey. She was last seen, police say, at the baggage pick-up carousel at Logan Airport.

Yesterday, George Webster described his daughter as "Miss Personality. She's a fun-loving girl and has lots of friends," he said.

About 30 of those friends have traveled across four New England states during the past few days, distributing information about her disappearance to newspapers and radio stations in the hope that increased publicity may turn up clues to her whereabouts.

"We're all very frustrated just sitting around, not knowing where she is or what's happened to her," Duncan said.

Webster left a high-paying job in a New York City architectural firm in 1980 to pursue her master's degree at Harvard. She received her undergraduate degree in 1978 from Syracuse University.

"We were all inundated and confused during the first few weeks at school last year," Julie Sullivan, one of the students who has helped organize the search for her friend, said yesterday. "Somehow she had gotten everyone's life story within two weeks. I could go to her and say, 'Who is that person?' and she would know all about him."

This year Webster has continued to live in University housing in Perkins Hall as a resident assistant in charge of counseling a group of graduate students.

Several of Webster's neighbors said yesterday that the prevailing sentiment in the dorm is one of disbelief, and a few students said they were too upset to speak about her disappearance.

"If something like this had happened to someone else in the dorm, she would have been the first one to be concerned and to be doing something about the situation," Ann Lichens, a first-year microbiology student, said.

Two students remembered Webster's first meeting with her advisees, when she emphasized the need for awareness about individual security. "She stressed how important it is to tell people your plans when you go away," one student said, and Lichens said she thinks it is unlikely that Webster would have "done anything unsafe, like take a ride from a stranger."

Duncan yesterday criticized several newspaper accounts of Webster's plight, which he said described her as "naive."

"She had spent two years in New York City and she is streetwise," Duncan said. "If something happened to her, it was not her fault."

While in New York, Webster developed a taste for Broadway theater, friends said, adding that she has continued to frequent the Boston theater circuit. Though design school course work occupied most of her time, Webster participated in a wide variety of sports and also engaged in an active social life.

"She had two or three fellows she was interested in," George Webster said, adding that his daughter was "too damn busy" to become seriously involved with any one of them.

The elder Webster said his daughter was intent on getting married and having children, but only after establishing an architectural career in her own firm.

A student in Webster's adopted family in Perkins Hall said that as an adviser, "you always knew you were welcome to go and see her because, literally, her door was always opened."

On Joan Webster's door, shut tight now for more than a week, is a list of emergency numbers for students, highlighted with the number for the Harvard police.

And there is a hand-written message: "I am usually here every evening (7:00-12:00) if you need to see me!