Dunlop's Iceberg

NOBODY at Tuesday's Faculty meeting chose to argue about changing the titles of Junior members. John T. Dunlop's Committee on the Retention and Recruitment of Faculty concluded that the position of instructor was an anachronism that should be abolished and that Harvard must pay higher starting salaries to attract and hold good young men. The Faculty agreed and wanted to get its approval on the books, so that the new system of titles can be used in the next few months as departments make appointments for 1969-70.

Revising titles was the Dunlop Report's main short-term recommendation, but the recommendations go much further, and already Tuesday the Faculty was getting started on the big questions--like the distribution of work and authority within the Faculty and the speed and direction of its growth.

Dunlop and his six associates (a high-powered group of full professors if ever there was one) made 48 Conclusions and Recommendations. Just what to do with that mass of suggestions is a dilemma that has eaten up plenty of administrative energy this fall and is not yet solved. Dean Ford assigned the job to Edward T. Wilcox, director of General Education, Secretary of the Committee on Educational Policy, and all-around administrative handy-man.

The last report as long and complicated as the Dunlop Committee's was the Doty report on General Education, Wilcox says, "and to this day it is very hard to find out just what the decision of the Faculty was." In a debate that spread out over more than a year, the Faculty eventually approved the principle of General Education while rejecting the plan the Doty Committee proposed, leaving the future shape of the program indeterminate.

"The fact is that legislation and English prose are two different things," Wilcox said last week, and to avoid a repetition of the Doty Report confusion, he tried to break down the 48 recommendations into items for legislation. Dunlop was cool to the idea of an item by item discussion from the first, and Wilcox concedes now that the attempt to translate recommendations into questions for debate and a vote was not a success. "Many of these things are linked, and you can't destroy the damned coherence of the prose."

Dunlop said Monday he would like to see the Faculty endorse the report in principle, section by section, deleting or rewording any recommendation that members find objectionable. "That commits nobody to every jot and tiddle of the report and gives the Faculty a chance for a more general discussion on questions like the economic restraints on expansion."

THE ISSUE of economic restraints was saved for the last few pages of the Dunlop Committee report, and one sensed that they were saving the big punch for the finale. One senses too that members of the Committee are anxious to get through recommendations on benefits, recruitment techniques, research fellows, housing and schooling, and start the Faculty talking about how to determine priorities for growth. Oscar Handlin, Charles Warren Professor of American History and one of the seven on the Committee, suggested at the meeting Tuesday that the Faculty is no longer able to make abstract decisions on academic policy (how to run tutorials, for instance) without tallying up the costs. This kind of economic realism runs all through the report and the Committee finally challenges the very informal structure by which growth is directed here.

A Faculty vote approving the final section of Dunlop's report would be a mandate increasing the already enormous power of the Dean of the Faculty. It would encourage him to set up new administrative apparatus that would accumulate data on departmental costs, to take a bigger role in allocating new professorships, and to call on the carpet those departments that make economically unsound policy decisions.

But before the Faculty deals with such cosmic questions of departmental autonomy and executive power, there will probably be votes on a few of the jots and tiddles. The Faculty may want to go on record on retirement benefits and recruiting techniques, and will almost certainly want to discuss a proposal to remove the ceiling from senior Faculty salaries. The Dunlop Committee handled the issue of paying for the schooling of Faculty children with a compromise--no direct grants, even for college, but a loan program that includes secondary schools as well as colleges. The recommendation can and may be attacked, either for being ungenerous or for implicitly slapping the Cambridge school system.

THE CHANGE in titles has already turned up one very specific issue--peripheral to the Committee's report but by no means trivial. By making instructors assistant professors, the Faculty has increased its voting membership for next year by about 70 to 100 members, and not everyone is sure that's a good idea. The Dunlop report in fact recommended that the status quo be frozen--by passing a rule requiring an assistant professor to serve three years before being allowed to vote.

The Committee on Educational Policy was not happy with that recommendation; it seemed, Dean Ford explained after the Oct. 23 meeting, that the Faculty was giving with one hand and taking away with the other. Dunlop came to the CEP meeting last week to explain the rationale of his committee's recommendations.

Expanding the Faculty might force the meetings out of the picturesque but already overcrowded room in University Hall. "One thinks rather sadly about having to leave the room," Wilcox says, but the real issue, he, Ford, and Dunop agree is whether meetings of the whole Faculty would still be administratively workable. "At some point in time we have to cease to be self-governing," Wilcox says, "the town meetings have to end and we have to switch to some kind of Faculty senate." That is a shift, though, that the Faculty will probably be very reluctant to make.

It is indelicate to talk about a Faculty "balance of power" which might shift with the addition of many new young members. If such a thing exists, no one will say it does. "This body is devoid of lobbying, as far as I know, which is very unusual for legislative bodies." Dunlop adds that a new flock of inexperienced members might force the Faculty to be less informal in introducing and debating resolutions and that he would prefer to see young Faculty members brought into the decision-making process at the departmental level (as the report suggests).

All this is "a rather emotional side issue" to the report, Dunlop says, and he would not try to fight the CEP on the Faculty floor. It is an issue, nonetheless, and once having adopted the first recommendation of the Dunlop report, it is an issue that the Faculty cannot avoid.

And some were arguing Tuesday that the Faculty has not yet settled the problem of making Harvard a more attractive place for young scholars--that in addition to higher pay and a more prestigous title, junior faculty need a lighter teaching load, better research facilities, and more of a voice in the governance of the University.