An Overseers' visiting committee has reported that the Graduate School of Design suffers from a "drift away from professional competence" and is "out of touch with the best people, and the best work" currently done in the design disciplines.

The panel's highly critical confidential report, a copy of which The Crimson obtained yesterday, argues that the long-troubled GSD must make major policy changes "if it is to be the pre-eminent institution that we [the committee] feel that it could, and should, become."

The committee assails the current focus of the Department of City and Regional Planning, arguing that it places "far too much emphasis" on policy analysis and social sciences, unwisely downplaying planning as a professional discipline.

Unsound

"A medical school set up in an analogous way, with a curriculum consisting mainly of biology and biochemistry, and little emphasis on diagnosis and clinical practice, would not offer a very sound medical education," the report adds.

The committee also argues that the GSD's urban design program "seems to have lost the position of innovative leadership that it once enjoyed." Now, the report says, the program is regarded as "something of a 'step child' whose existence as a separate entity is in question.

The visiting committee's report also criticizes the Architecture Department, noting its "underlying malaise" in 1975 and calling for an infusion of "talented new faculty." However, members of the committee indicated yesterday that they have a great deal of faith in the department's new chairman, Gerald M. McCue, who is also the GSD's associate dean.

The report also criticizes the GSD for failing to recognize that the "'leading edge' of knowledge" in the four design professions--planning, urban design, architecture and landscape architecture--is in their implementation. "The theory comes from the practice, and not the other way around," the report states.

In apparent reference to an on-going debate about what type of faculty the GSD should seek, the panel urged that "restrictions on professional activities not be permitted to cut Harvard off from the faculty it needs to maintain a vital curriculum."

Conspicuously absent from the document is an extended discussion of the controversial dean of the GSD, Maurice D. Kilbridge, an ex-Business School professor who took over the then-divided and financially lagging GSD in the late 1960s.

In the visiting committee's May 1975 meetings--according to confidential minutes published by The Crimson last spring and voided by the panel--Kilbridge's administration was compared to a receivership.

Before discussing the qualifications of a new dean, according to the minutes, "members suggested that Kilbridge cannot provide continued intellectual leadership and pointed to the need for a new Dean to bring the School to excellence."

Although the chairman of the visiting committee, Dan Paul, voided the notes because, he said, they "by no means represented the total opinion" of the panel, traces of the 1975 minutes are clearly evident in the more diplomatic report, which was presented to a meeting of the Overseers last fall.

R. Joyce Whitley, an architectural planner in Shaker Heights, Ohio, who served on the GSD visiting committee until this year, said yesterday that the report mentions Kilbridge only briefly--thanking him for helping the school through hard times--because President Bok told the panel during its annual visit last spring that, "in effect, Kilbridge was his man."

Whitley said she and several other committee members concluded that Bok was saying "you'd be wasting your time to even consider asking the school to come up with a new team." Had Bok not offered this support, she added, there probably would have been some discussion of Kilbridge at the meeting.