Fred L. Glimp '50, a former dean of the College, Monday assumed the post of vice president for alumni affairs and development, in which he will oversee the $250 million capital drive that University administrators plan to launch by next fall.

Glimp succeeds Dr. Chase N. Peterson '52, who left the University six months ago to become vice president for health affairs at the University of Utah. President Bok said yesterday that he has carried out the vice president's duties himself during the half-year search, rather than appoint an acting vice president.

Familiar Face

Glimp was dean of admissions and financial aid from 1960 to 1967, and dean of the College from 1967 to 1969, the year students occupied University Hall and College officials called in metropolitan police to carry them out.

Glimp, who served as a teaching fellow in Economics in the late '50s and received a Harvard Ph.D. in 1964, said yesterday, "I really came here in 1946 and didn't leave until 1969."

Since 1969 Glimp has served as executive director of the Permanent Charity Fund, a $70 million community foundation that annually distributes almost $4 million in seed money for greater Boston projects in social welfare, health, education, culture and low-income housing.

The directorship was a "wonderful watching and listening post," Glimp said.

Bok said Glimp's new position "requires more than anything else the ability to understand the University and have a broad acquaintance in the alumni body."

Glimp has "a broad range of very good friends not only among administrators but among faculty members, and at the same time has an unusually broad acquaintance among alumni," he added.

In addition to the University's major fund drive, Glimp will handle other fundraising efforts and alumni activities, and will serve on the board of directors of alumni-oriented Harvard Magazine.

Glimp said the University's major drive, expected to last five years, will be used mainly to bolster undergraduate financial aid and faculty salaries by building up endownment in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. The drive is "not for bricks and mortar," he said.

Some of the money may also be targeted for remodeling in Widener Library, and some may be used to endow student activities in the Houses, Glimp said.

Glimp added that one possible new form of financial aid to be funded by the drive would be "student assistantship" posts, by which undergraduates could earn money through academic work.

Currently much of the undergraduate scholarship budget comes directly out of tuition payments, Glimp said.

Glimp added that, in relation to the cost of living, faculty salaries have been declining, and "in the long run the quality of the faculty and the quality of students determines the quality of the institution."

Bok said about 10 per cent of the amount to be raised in the new drive will be devoted to programs in public policy at the newly-expanded Kennedy School of Government.

Although Glimp said he has had no direct fund-raising experience, he "used to deal with a few donors" in the Financial Aid Office, and on the Permanent Charity Fund he talked with "people trying to assess prospects for their own campaigns."

Since leaving Harvard, Glimp has served on the Strauch Committee, which recommended in 1974 that the admissions offices of Harvard and Radcliffe Colleges merge.

Glimp, a resident of Belmont, was also chairman of the Public/Private Forum on Higher Education of Massachusetts, and is presently a director of the Charlestown Savings Bank.

In his new role Glimp said he has to "get people to see that the enterprise is bigger, more important than the individual party talking about it. A place like Harvard would be very ordinary if it did not have a big endowment. Then the ups and downs of the economy and fads and fashions and politics would have a lot more to do with the direction the enterprise takes."