`This job is one in which you are overwhelmed by events continually. Much of your time is spent muddling through, doing the best you can. Fourteen people a day--a half-hour--that's the most difficult aspect of it. I'm not going to miss it."

--Outgoing Dean of the Faculty HENRY ROSOVSKY, 1984

`To make a great institution continue to be great appealed to me so much that I have little difficulty deciding that I ought to do it.'

--A. MICHAEL SPENCE, on being named Rosovsky's successor, 1984.

Passing Radcliffe's Reins

`I've never put a label on myself. I'm not typecast as an active supporter of women because my portfolio is on a different scope, but I've worked as much as I could, more in a quiet diplomacy style because I've been in inner circles in the institutions I've been working with, and I've had the oporunity to tweak the system at the right time, to get the point across.'

--Radcliffe President LINDA S. WILSON, shortly after her appointment in 1989.

`It makes me sound like some sort of disease.'

--MICHELE J. ORZA '84, Harvard's first (and at that time only) Women's Studies concentrator, on being referred to as an "isolated incident."

Gone But Not Forgotten

`I am disappointed but not ashamed at being turned down by Harvard. I join a long list of distinguished people turned down by Harvard. Not a list I intended to join, but an honorable list nonetheless.'

--PAUL E. STARR, former associate professor of sociology, 1985.

`You've sat on them or you got laid on them. Everyone has had an experience on a picnic table.'

--Former Cabot House Master and Director of the Office for the Arts MYRA A. MAYMAN, describing an artistic display of picnic tables in the Radcliffe Quad.

A Dean on the Defensive