Moynihan felt that new professorships may help provide a "critical mass," where enough people from different disciplines gather in one community to look at the same urban problems and to reinforce each other with their different backgrounds. "The distinctive quality of urban studies is that they call on disciplines spread throughout the departments and professional schools of a modern university," he said. "In the case of Harvard and M.I.T., they require not only a high degree of interdisciplinary work, but also a very great deal of interuniversity cooperation.

Harvard already has considerable urban programs in the faculties that will receive the new chairs and also in the graduate schools of Business, Medicine, Divinity, and Public Health.

Source of Funds

The Joint Center will continue to be a source of research funds and a center for seminars and research publications at the two universities.

According to several Harvard officials, some chairs may be filled by next fall. Ford will allow the University to use the endowment income temporarily for junior faculty until the permanent appointments are made.

Harvard's interest in a Ford grand began last fall with conversations between Bundy and Pusey. In the early winter, Pusey asked Wilson to review faculty strengths and weaknesses and to make suggestions as to how a grant could make its strongest contribution among the Harvard faculties. Wilson assessed the capacities, degrees of promise, and depth of involvement in various areas of the University and recommended a package of chairs.

Then Pusey sent an application to the foundation January 3 for a grant approximately twice the size of the final one. In the spring and early summer, Price chaired a committee that included Wilson and Moynihan to handle the negotiations and administer the relevant information between Ford and the involved Harvard schools. "Ford did a good bit of visiting, but in the end pretty much left the priorities to Harvard," Price stated last week.

During the summer, rumors floated around the School of Education that the grant would include funds for action programs and that at the last minute these were dropped. But Harvard officers have said that the nature of the grant was decided by Pusey and the foundation at an early stage.

"We appreciate research and action money, but in this grant it was critical to get people now," said Wilson. "Unanimity existed among the people involved on this question, and there was surprising ease in deciding where the priorities lie."

Theodore R. Sizer, Dean of the Faculty of Education, said Tuesday that the $3 million Ford grant was a "long-term sort of thing, whereas our action programs are more short-ranged." He added that Ford had awarded the school $230,000 for another year's continuation of its studies and programs on racial integration