When faculty members in the History Department began viewing excerpts of the Visiting Committee report to the Board of Overseers recently, many came away bewildered.

Before the report had been made available to them, Burton S. Dreben '49, dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, had told a March meeting of faculty members that the report was one of the worst received by any University department. The dean had gone on to speak of low morale and other severe problems in the graduate program.

Dreben's account probably surprised few in the department-- graduate students have been griping about their program for a long time. But when professors went to look at the visiting report excerpts, many were baffled at the blandness of the evaluation. The report was hardly written in the highly critical terms Dreben had suggested.

Last week, sources said that a number of departmental faculty members and a member of the visiting committee asked a senior professor to write to Dreben for a clarification.

According to one source, Dreben responded by admitting that his criticism of the graduate program came more from day to day contact with graduate students than from the visiting committee report.

Other sources say Dreben mistakenly believed the raw data collected from unhappy graduate students--which he apparently used in the March meeting--would be included in the final report.

Most of it wasn't. Everyone who has seen visiting report excerpts views them as unrepresentative of the graduate students' complaints.

But while graduate students are pleased that Dreben aired their discontent, at least one senior faculty member questions the appropriateness of the dean's comments in the context in which they were made.

That professor claims that the meeting at which Dreben made his critical comments was set up to discuss possible decreases in the number of students in the department's graduate program.

He sees Dreben's citing of low morale and other problems as an almost Machiavellian move designed to hold down the numbers of graduate students in the department.