Wilson was granted a tenured position at the University of California at Los Angeles. In what officials termed an unprecedented move, Harvard allowed Wilson to keep his Harvard chair for the next three years, during which he will divide his time between the two schools.

Wilson, a native Californian and one of the country's foremost experts on crime and bureaucracy, said that at the end of the three years he will choose between the two.

Until then he will keep himself busy working on, among other things, on a 26-episode TV series--to be aired on public stations--on crime and criminal behavior.

Department members also announced the revamping of their graduate studies program in what they called the department's biggest reform in 30 years.

Professors said the restructuring and tightening of the requirements for government graduate students grew out of the feeling that the current program was too specialized. They hope the changes will help the grads where it counts in finding jobs in the ever-tough academic market.

Divinity School

Little short of a revelation will startle the quiet scholars who inhabit Andover Hall, but this summer came pretty close. The Harvard Divinity School is in the midst of an unprecedented turnover in Faculty, and now is looking for seven full-time professors.

The biggest loss was that of Mellon Professor of Divinity Krister Stendahl, who announced plans to leave Harvard this September to become the Bishop of Stockholm in the Church of Sweden. Stendahl, who came to Harvard from Sweden 30 years ago, is one of the world's foremost authorities on The New Testament, and he served as dean of the school from 1968 to 1979.

Along with his departure, resignations and the coincidental ending of three associate professors terms put the school in the market for six more professors. Two of the openings are at the tenured level, and three are at the junior level. Two others, in Christian historical theology and archeology, have optional ranks, and the school is reviewing candidates at all levels.

Significantly, among the new openings is the school's first position--a junior-level job--in Afro-American Religion. The next tenured professor at the school will also be the first such new appointment in seven or eight years, administrators say. There are 40 faculty members at the Div School, including 15 part-time professors.

Controversy

Robert M. Coles '50, professor of Psychiatry and Medical Humanities, is no stranger to conflict, but he may have waded into the hottest controversy of his career--children and nuclear war. For several years now, a group of doctors and psychiatrists, many of them Harvard-affiliated, has put forth the idea that the threat of nuclear war poses a unique psychological danger to children--an idea with which Coles now takes issue.

In a widely publicized speech in Los Alamos, N.M., Coles presented recent research findings in which he attacks as methodologically flawed studies that conclude that the threat of nuclear war has terrorized children.

Instead, says the celebrated child psychiatrist, interviews he conducted around the country indicate that children--especially those from working-class families--have reacted to the nuclear age with far less fear than psychiatric research has indicated.

On other fronts, Harvard professors busily stirred up controversy. Professor of Law Alan M. Dershowitz began a one-man campaign to get the University to award honorary degrees to Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharoy, his wife Yelena Bonner, and other political prisoners and dissidents.