David S. Landes, Goelet Professor of French History, said yesterday, "Given the scope of Professor Handlin's indiscretion, I can well understand his desire to limit the damage."
Landes yesterday confirmed that during the coming week he intends to resign from the History department and join the Economics department, effective July 1.
Handlin, who is currently in San Diego, could not be reached for further comment despite repeated efforts.
Handlin, as a University Professor, receives a 12-month salary, and is thus ineligible to collect the summer stipend from the Warren Center.
According to one Warren Center source, the practice of making summer stipends from Warren Center income available to the American history professors on a regular basis began only in recent years. The source said that the practice became widespread after Rosovsky used offers of summer stipends as a bargaining chip in bringing to the University David Donald, Warren Professor of American Civilization, Stephen Thernstrom, professor of History, and Robert Fogel, who holds appointments in both Economics and History.
After the new senior American history professors were allowed access to the Warren funds for summer stipends, other tenured American history professors demanded access to the money as well, the source said. Rosovsky yesterday refused to confirm or deny this analysis.
Rosovsky and Fleming both repeatedly refused to release any Warren Center budgetary information this week.
"This sort of thing ought not to come out," Fleming said, referring to the details of the Center's budget.
He did, however, describe the amount of Warren Center funds going to the summer salaries as "substantial," though less than the total income being used to fund the Warren Fellows program.
One Warren Center source estimated that about 15 to 20 per cent of the Warren Center's annual income is utilized to fund the summer stipends.
The Crimson reached a similar estimate through an analysis of the yearly endowment income of the Warren Center, which are public record, and anonymous reports of the range of academic salaries paid to the senior Americanists, and the number of professors who request the stipend from the Center each summer.
Though a substantial number of members of the History Department this week said they believe the use of the Warren Center income is improper, none suggested that the funding procedures are illegal.
According to the terms of the Charles Warren endowment, the "enumeration of ways and uses shall not be deemed exclusive of other uses" to which the President "in his discretion may see fit to apply the net income of the fund."
Junior History faculty and History graduate students contacted this week consistently said they did not know that Warren Center summer stipends for the senior Americanists existed.
One departmental source described the Warren Center as "a very comfortable cow, where everybody's got a teet. The question is who's pulling hardest and when is the cow going to run dry.