No Comment

Dean Kilbridge and other GSD officials, including John F. Kain, chairman of the City and Regional Planning Department, refused yesterday to comment on the report. Several said they would not speak because the Board of Overseers had asked them not to discuss reports of the visiting committee.

Kain has been the source of controversy since he moved into the Planning Department chairman's seat from the Economics Department, where he still holds a full professorship. The department has grown markedly in the last two years, and it now holds over 200 students as does the Architecture Department. There are about 600 students in the entire school.

In November 1975 first-year students in the department protested several of Kain's policies, including what they called an overemphasis on quantitative methods and slighting of fields such as physical design.

They also questioned Kain's preference for hiring less experienced younger faculty and giving them extensive sabbaticals to gain experience, rather than hiring practicing, experienced professionals.

A number of GSD sources said yesterday this debate is now going on between members of the faculty and administration as part of a review of the criteria used to select faculty.

Several of these criticisms surfaced in the visiting committee report, which includes a lengthy quote from a May 1976 letter written by Dorn C. McGrath Jr., the chairman of the George Washington University Department of Urban and Regional Planning and at that time member of the panel.

Among the points made in the letter, a copy of which The Crimson also obtained yesterday from local sources, were the following:

Chairman Kain, "although well-known as an economist and analyst of selected urban systems, is neither a city planner nor a regional planner";

Of eight new or proposed faculty appointments in the department last spring, only one held a degree in planning or had direct experience in the professional field;

Policy analysis is not urban planning and, unlike the other design disciplines, does not share "a basic reliance upon creativity and the ability of the practitioner to synthesize content from several fields and to formulate and apply physical, as well as social, economic and political principles to affect the natural and man-made environment."

In a telephone interview yesterday, McGrath said he has seen "no evidence that anyone has paid much attention to the visiting committee report."

A number of University officials yesterday condemned the unauthorized release of the report, arguing that it--along with publication of the minutes last year--has weakened the system of visiting committee oversight.

This system includes 60 visiting committees that report to the Board of Overseers, 30 alumni and alumnae who constitute one of the two central Governing Boards of the University. The committees are intended to raise money and report on the effectiveness of the department or school they oversee.

In addition, according to a University pamphlet; they are intended "to bring new ideas and fresh viewpoints to the University, to prevent provincialism, inbreeding and self-satisfaction and to serve as a liaison with the disciplines as represented outside Harvard.