General Counsel Steiner has one assistant in an office that is now regarded as a major nerve center at Mass Hall, handling the growing volume of federal legislation like the recently passed Buckley Amendment, opening student files, and various titles, labor disputes and law suits. The dean of the College has a mass of deans and assistant deans under him, often formally repeating functions that are limited to housing, counseling and disciplinary groups like the Administrative Board. Budget cuts, which Faculty academic departments suffered through in the last few years, didn't fall heavily on the College dean's office. It expanded numerically in the face of austerity for everyone else.

Whatever else may be true about the office of the dean of the College, there is probably no more respected administrator to students and subordinates than the current dean, Whitlock. Finally, his past conflict with Rosovsky may be based on a difference of emphasis: trained as a clinical psychologist, and one of the first instructors in Harvard's "encounter groups" course, Social Relations 1200, in the late forties, Whitlock is a firm believer in the importance of tutoring and counseling systems to students. Rosovsky attaches much more importance to faculty teaching; higher education in his view centers around the lecture hall.

But rumors of Whitlock's hesitance in taking on his new assignment as associate dean of the Faculty, in charge of coordinating Rosovsky's task forces on undergraduate education, seem pretty unfounded. Whitlock now says that if "I had to deal with House transfer policy again, I'd end up at McLeans"--and on the pending reform Whitlock and the dean of the Faculty see eye-to-eye, at least on the strategic level. Both want to implement task force recommendations starting next year, after sifting through them, on a bit-by-bit basis. They want to avoid presenting grand plans such as those that went down to defeat in past years at Yale and Princeton because of Faculty opposition to specific sections of each plans. If this approach works, Whitlock may emerge as the man who aided most in what another administrator says is one of Rosovsky's fondest wishes: to restore the importance of undergraduate teaching.

The Faculty's other associate dean in academic matters, Francis M. Pipkin, although a friend of Rosovsky's, is clearly not a member of his innermost administrative circles. As head of the CHUL, Pipkin presided over that body's waffling and disagreement, never giving much leadership. He concluded his tenure by giving the unwanted chairmanship back to Rosovsky. On other matters, his record is similarly ambiguous--his work in the tightening of honors standards was foremost, but every amendment he produced to plug the original legislative holes seemed to open several new ones.

Pipkin says attempting to get faculty approval for curriculum reform is "like herding a flock of cattle." He and other administrators characterize faculty conservatism as "negative recalcitrance"--a minority opposition to reorienting toward more undergraduate teaching admixed with plenty of apathy. Many UHall administrators seem to agree that limited reform is in the air, but at best it is a type of reform that is unthreatening to traditional senior faculty prerogatives. An administrator notes that legislation allowing students credit for summer courses taken elsewhere under certain conditions--passed last year in the Faculty Council--might never have succeeded if brought before a full Faculty meeting, where the move could have been thwarted, as some conservative faculty members may have viewed it as a threat to Harvard's sense of prestige vis-a-vis other universities. Remembrance of the late sixties and the "troubles," as one administrator calls it, prevent too much faculty enthusiasm for change.

The changes that have come about or are now being planned by Rosovsky--like the budget cuts and a new emphasis on teaching--are the products of persuasion, not top-down commands. Kaufmann says that "a senior faculty can ruin a dean of the Faculty," and other administrators agree that their role is advice and service and possibly even leadership but certainly not conflict. The faculty and its administrators seem to have an unspoken agreement which is, on the faculty's side: "Do what is necessary to change us in accord with external imperatives, but keep our basic power and structure intact."

Rosovsky says the UHall administration is a "family"--he does not add, because he does not need to, that the senior faculty is its first cousin. Like every family, the faculty and Faculty administrators quarrel, as they may well do over reform of core curriculum and General Education next year. But like many families, they can, for the moment, share basic assumptions about themselves and their relationship to the world outside.