When President Pusey announced the appointment of a new University Librarian last October, the news met with a rash of unsubstantiated rumors about faculty politics and personalities. Yet behind the rumors lay a largely undebated question: What effect will the appointment of Paul H. Buck to succeed Keyes D. Metcalf have on library and educational policy?

The change in librarians is certainly more than a new face behind a desk in America's oldest university library, more than a matter of the new Presiden's efforts to win the confidence of the faculty. It will affect each of the library's 15,000 regular users, and each of the 5,800,000 volumes which make it America's largest University library.

The library is an 87-unit administrative problem, spending $2,400,000 a year, employing 342 people, and its head is thus one of the key administrators in the university bureaucracy. But his job is not merely organizational. The librarian controls what the Overseers have called "perhaps our most important tool in educating," in a university which the president has described as "almost built upon books." From his administrative office, the librarian can, if he wishes, play a larger role in defining the Harvard education than any other man at the University.

A Permanent Effect

His role is magnified by its long-term importance. The scholarly work of every educator and every professor is ultimately consigned to the librarian. By determining how this material will be assembled and made available to the public, the librarian has a permanent effect upon the course of scholarship.

The appointment of Buck, the scholar, will serve to reemphasize the educational and scholarly aspects of this triple office, of administrator, educator, and scholar, in a way which was never contemplated by Metcalf, the professional librarian.

Buck comes to his position with unquestioned qualifications. He has twice served as acting president, once when President Conant was working on the Manhattan Project, and once when the Corporation was choosing a successor to the newly-appointed High Commissioner of Germany. He is known privately as the man who resigned to give the new president a free hand, the last man to fill the powerful office of Provost. A popular professor who gives a course in the history of the South, he is also a gifted administrator to whom President Pusey offered a position at the first possible opportunity.

Back in the Good Old Days

Metcalf is a different man of a different background. Called from the New York Public Library in 1937, he was the first University librarian without a Harvard degree. Retiring at 66 as one of America's leading professional librarians, he resembles a business executive more than a University official.

He sees the library in terms of 120 miles of shelving, filling 12,000,000 cubic feet, the fourth largest college collection in the world. "We don't deal in personalities, just books and services," he says, perhaps thinking of his 18-year effort to win the confidence of the faculty he serves.

He admits that relations are sometimes strained, because, "faculties tend to look askance at administrators of all kinds, wishing for the time when the university's wheels will go round automatically, as we like to think they did long ago, in the days which deans were less numerous and administrative offices took less space."

To Anticipate or Make Trouble?

The conflict is not based purely on prejudice, he admits, for "faculties are conservative bodies, and tend to oppose change so long as things appear to be going satisfactorily," while he sees himself as an administrator, whose job is to "anticipate trouble."

As a result, some of the faculty conceive him to be an administrative radical seeking unnecessary changes, which they almost believe are designed solely to disconcert the faculty.

In appointing Buck, President Pusey has not removed the conflict between faculty and administration, but he has removed some of the prejudices. The faculty has always expected the librarian to be a scholar, an educator, an historian, for the librarian is in a sense the only man who controls the scholar's work.