Daniel Patrick Moynihan, former Assistant Secretary of Labor, is being considered by the Joint Center for Urban Studies of Harvard and M.I.T., for appointment as its next director. The term of the Center's present director, James Q. Wilson, expires at the end of the academic year.

Moynihan is reportedly also being considered for appointment as an affiliate of the prospective Kennedy Institute of Politics, for a lectureship in the Harvard Graduate School of Public Administration, and for a professorship at the Graduate School of Education.

According to the Periscope column of this week's Newsweek magazine Moynihan in under consideration for a 'four-hatted professorship," which would include all of these positions.

Former Kennedy Aide

Currently a fellow at Wesleyan University's Center for Advanced Studies, Moynihan was Assistant Secretary of Labor in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations from 1963 until 1965, when he left Washington to run for New York City Council President on Paul Screvane's ticket. He was defeated in the Democratic primary.

He also served an assistant secretary to the Governor of New York State during the administration of W. Averell Harriman.

Moynihan is the author of the recently published pamphlet, The Negro Family, a factual study of the "structural distortions in the life of the Negro American."

The pamphlet describes and gives statistics on such problems as dissolved Negro marriages, illegitimate Negro births, matriarchy in Negro families, delinquency and crime, and alienation. It came under attack at a White House conference on civil rights this full because some civil rights leaders interpreted it as being anti Negro.

He co-authored Beyond the Melting Pot, a 1963 study of minority groups in New York City, with Nathan Glazer. "The point about the melting pot," he says in the introduction, "is that it did not happen."