Seymour Martin Lipset, professor of Government and Social Relations, will probably leave the Faculty at the end of this academic year and accept a tenured position at Stanford University beginning next fall, sources said yesterday.

The sources said that Lipset is leaving largely for personal reasons related to his wife's health, and not out of any political or professional grievances against the University.

Lipset, who had been offered the chairmanship of the Sociology Department in February, told Dean Rosovsky of his decision to leave in April, the sources said.

Lipset's decision " appears to be final," a source at Stanford said yesterday, adding that it is "90 to 95 percent certain" that Lipset will be at Stanford next year.

The sources said that only an informal agreement, not a contract, now exists between Lipset and Stanford.

Following Lipset's decision, Rosovsky named Harrison C. White, professor of Sociology for the department chairmanship beginning July 1, White's appointment was approved by President Bok and announced at a full Faculty meeting last Tuesday.

Lipset was unavailable for comment yesterday.

Dean Rosovsky declined to comment.

Sources at Stanford said yesterday Lipset will probably assume the same type of joint tenured professorship of Stanford in political science and sociology he now holds at Harvard.

The sources also said Lipset will probably be primarily involved as a research fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institute on War, Revolution and Peace, which studies social, political and economic change in America.

Lipset considered accepting an identical offer from Stanford last year, but decided to stay at Harvard last fall.

Wesley Campbell, director of the Hoover Institution, declined to comment yesterday.

At that time, Lipset said he was considering the move to Stanford because he and his wife "would rather live in California." Lipset first came to Harvard in 1965 as a visiting- professor, while holding a tenured professorship at the University of California at Berkeley.

Lipset has written more than a dozen books on political movements and political sociology, and has recently published an essay on student movements and political controversies at Harvard in a book with David Riesman '31, Ford Professor of Social Sciences called "Education and Politics at Harvard."

Sources in the Sociology Department said yesterday that Lipset's departure left a "major gap," and that the department's main task next year would be to make plans to fill Lipset's position and possibly expand the department's faculty.

The Sociology Department's faculty is small-with far fewer tenured faculty members than other social science departments-and will push next year for several new tenured positions, the sources said.