When the new Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences becomes installed in his office in University Hall 5, he will have little chance to sit back in the wide leather chair and relax. The Dean ship is a post involving thousands of decisions.

And the decisions must be made quickly. Above all, Franklin L. Ford will have to deal with departments, and departments are singularly demanding. They need snap approvals or vetoes of funds for special projects, suggestions on revising teaching loads of junior Faculty and graduate students, permission to appoint men to replace professors on sabbatical.

To the beleaguered Dean, departments and their Chairmen seem perpetually greedy. So McGeorge Bundy found, when chairmen repeatedly expressed their astonishment at seeing Program for Harvard College funds pouring into fields other than their own. The unrestricted funds of the Faculty, over which the Dean has control, are claimed every year by hundreds of departments and committees--by Chemistry, by the scholarships office, by General Education. They can go anywhere, and everybody wants them.

The committees are, if anything, even tougher nuts to crack. Here the Dean's most important function lies in his capacity as chairman of the Committee on Educational Policy that makes the key recommendations on the floor of the Faculty. Sometimes (as Bundy did with the Committees on Gen Ed and Advanced Standing) the Dean must juggle committees and departments whose aims are opposite to rejuvenate each of them.

Ford will, furthermore, have to help recruit. If Philosophy lacks an existentialist, or Economics has too many researchers and too few teachers, he will have to raid intelligently to fill the gaps. Besides attracting other men from the outside, he has to make sure that those already at the University are too happy to be stolen.

The Board of Overseers this morning approved the appointment of Franklin Lewis Ford, professor of History, as Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

Ford will take over in September from President Pusey, acting Dean of the Faculty. Pusey, has been acting dean since McGeorge Bundy resigned on December 31, 1960, to take office as a Washington assistant to President Kennedy.

The Overseers' action brought to a close an eighteen-month search for a new Dean.

The Faculty's eleventh Dean was on leave for the academic year ending today as a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at, ford, California. He had been Senior Tutor at Lowell House from until his departure in 1961, and professor of History since 1959.

Ford also chaired the historic Committee on College Admission which reported two years ago on of admission to Harvard. He is currently a trustee of Radcliffe, and, as Dean automatically become chairman Committee on Educational Policy on which he has served as a member since 1957.

As a historian of modern Europe, he has taught seventeenth-century history and modern German history he joined the Harvard faculty in spent 1955-56 in Germany as a Guggenheim Fellow and became an professor here the following year.

Born December 26, 1920, he doctorate from Harvard in 1950 teaching at Bennington College. His earlier degrees include an A.B. from the University of Minnesota (1942) and a Harvard M.A. in 1948. In the year coming to Harvard he studied in on a Fulbright Research Fellowship.

His Strasbourg in Transition, won the coveted Faculty Prize of the Harvard University Press for 1958. Ford has also written on seventeenth-century alignments of the French Robe and Sword and contributed to The Diplomats: 1919-1939. His most recent work was "The World of lightenment" in Columbia University's 1961 publication Chapters in Civilization.

Ford served in the Office of Services during World War Two came first to Harvard after the has been elected to membership Massachusetts Historical Society year, to the American Academy and Sciences.

Ford becomes the second Dean Faculty to work under President Bundy took office in 1953 just after became president. The post of Dean back to 1890.

controversy. For his is a position of widespread influence. Faculty spokesman, for example, the Dean has a vital in the line of communications between Faculty and administration. And because the Dean controls the Faculty's , he plays a major part in the financial organization of the University. Thus the Dean is in many ways a sort of prime minister to the President; Professor Ford will be acting as Dr. Pusey's right-hand man for internal affairs. In the past, the extent of the authority delegated to the has depended on his personal relation with the President, and on how much attention the president devotes to the of the College, as opposed to those of the University the College is a most important concern of the of Arts and Sciences, and thus the College is a most responsibility of that Faculty's Dean. The Dean this responsibility alone, or he can share it with a who is concerned for the College. Though the automatically thinks of the College as the of the University, not all Harvard Presidents have agreed. Some have considered the nine graduate schools (Arts and Sciences, law, medicine, and business largest) to be vastly more worthy. Such Presidents have devoted little time to the College.

Another factor affecting the amount of authority the Dean is the relative interest of the President in internal affairs. The President must speak for Harvard the outside world; when he is busy doing so, the powerful man inside the University is the head of its Faculty, that of Arts and Sciences.

The position of Dean of the Faculty was first created in did not become important until fifty years later, when speech-minded Harvard President James Bryant over the University to an obscure but capable old history professor named Paul Buck.

The effects of the Buck regime were far-reaching. The before he took office, the Faculty Committee on Educational Policy had been formed, and acting through it Buck was able to initiate a host of new policies. Some of the most innovations came only in round-about ways-- can be traced back to Buck or to the CEP -- which to much the same thing. For example, one of the of the CEP was a possible disintegration of the curriculum because of wartime drain on Harvard . The CEP established a few survey courses the core of a liberal arts education; and out of the on this subject emerged the idea of general education. A committee chaired by Buck was set up to study the ; the committee report led to the present course required of all undergraduates. (The General Education program is discussed in detail elsewhere in this issue.) Education was perhaps the most significant of the policy innovations of the Buck regime, but there many others, including the establishment of the Department of Social Relations and the Russian Research Center. , many said, was happier away from Cambridge , and the range of authority he delegated to Buck educational planning. Thus, Buck opened the towards integrating Harvard and Radcliffe, and decision at Harvard to scrap big-time football for the formation of the Ivy League.

Conant was scrupulously attentive to that president's job which is perhaps more important than any other -- making the right appointments at the right fundamentally, he wanted someone else to run for him. Buck did just this, and the sentiments expressed in an address to the alumni the spring after his retirement were no exaggeration: "For more than a decade he and I, if I may say so, have been a team. I happened to have worn the ranking hat, but he carried the load; the initiative, imagination, accomplishment were his. For his assistance, I shall always be grateful."

In Conant's successor, Nathan M. Pusey, Harvard has acquired a president concerned more with undergraduate education than with the speaking tours of the Conant regime. Pusey came to Harvard from Lawrence College, a small, liberal arts institution in Appleton, Wis., where he had taught undergraduates for over half of his nine-year as president.

The appointment of McGeorge Bundy as Dean of Faculty -- a candidate urged upon Pusey by Buck -- made it difficult for the new president to reach the College.

Bundy continued the Buck interpretation of the functions and powers of a Dean. A typical Bundy project was the Sophomore Standing program. In his first weeks in office he drafted a report advocating creation of Advanced Placement and Sophomore Standing, and within a month had successfully steered his proposals through the CEP and a meeting of the full Faculty.

External problems of the kind suited primarily to presidential attention -- such as the $82-and-a-half-million Program for Harvard College -- also kept Pusey from taking a close hand in the educational affairs of the College. It was Bundy, not Pusey, who organized the Freshman Seminar Program.

Pusey and Bundy were an effective team, but the division of power was not what a President concerned for the College would desire. The next Dean will almost certainly lack Bundy's freedom in determining educational policy.

And pressure downward from Pusey will not be the only check on the new Dean's freedom. Another potential challenge comes from a man who on paper would seem to be a subordinate to the Faculty Dean, the Dean of the College, John U. Monro. In practice, however, Monro has tended to subordinate, and has acted more often as a free agent troubleshooting around the Harvard administration at will. The need for such a man is great, but it is apparent only after a rather tortuous line of reasoning has been followed. The theory runs this way: Faculty men have a predilection, as scholars, for research. Pusey, in fact, has stated that he feels most scholars are fully as loyal to their discipline as to their college. Only a man who sympathized with this orientation toward scholarship could lead the Faculty. But leadership too far in the direction of research would harm the College, even if it enhanced the University's status as a center of knowledge.

To offset research orientation, Pusey has said he will rely on "a dissenting voice on behalf of the College" and this is where Monro comes into the picture. The Dean of the College traditionally attends the meetings of the Committee on Educational Policy, but where past College deans have in many cases been considered primarily to be administrators, Monro is also known as a source of ideas. Even if Ford's voice in College affairs will be a little less omnipotent than was Bundy's, Ford will still have another, hitherto undiscussed responsibility; and it is a responsibility whose importance has increased many times over in the past 10 or 15 years. It is, simply, to maintain the calibre of the Harvard Faculty in the face of competition for personnel with other educational institutions. Pusey has noted that offers for well-salaried positions at other colleges are coming to Harvard professors "with increasing frequency;" one reason he sees for the rise is the greater amount of money available to educational institutions from federal grants.

In short, looking after the Faculty of Arts and Sciences is no mean feat. And there is little doubt that the task will keep Ford busy.