American composer Roger Sessions is to be the Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard next year. At Radcliffe, Mr. and Mrs. Richard R. Baxter will succeed the Honorable Maureen Neuberger as head of South House.

Sessions's one-year appointment will require him to give six public lectures and teach a course in composition during the first term.

His Symphony No. 2 won the Critics Award as the best American orchestral work performed in New York in 1949-1950, and the Walter Naumberg Foundation Award.

Sessions previously held teaching posts at Princeton, Smith, and the University of California at Berkeley. He succeeds Jorge Luis Borges.

International Law

Baxter, who is vice-president of the American Branch of the International Law Association, is an expert on international law. He has been on the Faculty of Harvard Law School since 1955, and is author of The Law of International Waterways. He is a colonel in the U.S. Army Reserves.

Harriet Baxter, who graduated from Pembroke and holds an M.S.S. from Smith, is a psychiatric social worker at McLean Hospital in Belmont. In 1966, she worked in a British out-patient psychiatric clinic while her husband was a Guggenheim fellow at Cambridge.

One of the Baxters' two daughters, Alison, is a sophomore at Radcliffe.