Housemaster Study New Deans System

Housemasters will meet a week from today to prepare a recommendation for replacing the current deans system with seven House deans.

Suggestions for this reform were first made in the Report on Advising, which committee headed by Dean Bender submitted last fall and toward which the Faculty of Arts and Sciences has since extended official sympathy.

The Bender Report asked that the Dean's Office be decentralized so that the Deans' services might become more personal and so that still more strength might be added to the House system.

It is understood that currently the Housemasters are agreed that they favor the House deans idea. The House dean would not supplant the Master in any way but would work with him as specialist in each House residents personal and disciplinary problems. The authors of the Bender Report and the Housemasters feel that House Dean living close to the students, will be in a better position to prevent trouble before it reaches serious stages than the can under the current system.

For several weeks a committee of several Masters under Ronald M. Perry, Master of Winthrop, has been studying the qualifications, characteristics, and status a House dean should have.

Some questions posed by Provost Buck recently are: 1) Should the House dean's duties be confined to being a dean or should he occupy another post on a faculty? 2) How long should a man be a House dean and what would happen to him thereafter? 3) Should he have any educational functions?

No matter what the change in dean systems, the post of Dean of the College, which will be occupied by a new man next September, will not disappear, though it might change somewhat. Somebody will have to administrate the House deans system.