`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

The Dickinsons "were looking to buy prestige in Boston...Joanne [Dickinson] posed the interests [sic] bluntly, `Charles and I need an identity. We can not very well say we are philanthropists at cocktail parties. We want to be affiliated with Harvard, and we want to invest in something stimulating and established.'"

--from a 1988 memo to Kennedy School Dean GRAHAM T. ALLISON '62, discussing a proposed deal to offer Charles and Joanne Dickinson Officer of the University status in exchange for a $250,000 grant.

`I am against change in Harvard Square.'

--Cambridge Mayor ALFRED E. VELLUCCI in 1988.

'The only thing that remains constant about Harvard Square is that it is in a constant state of flux.'

--Former Associate Vice President for Government and Community Affairs JACQUELINE O'NEILL, the same year.

`I suppose one says `lady and gentlemen' instead of `gentlemen,' but [otherwise] I don't think it makes that much difference in today's world.'

--Former Corporation member ANDREW HEISKELL, commenting on Judith Richards Hope who in 1989 became the first woman to sit on the 339-year-old governing board.

Bok, Bennett & the Core

`There are too many intellectual and educational casualties among the student body at Harvard.'

--Secretary of Education WILLIAM J. BENNETT, 1987

`Instead of pursuing the questions in an informed and sober manner, he has followed his penchant for delivering highly publicized polemics against educational practices which he has not studied in detail and policies with which he happens to disagree.'

--President DEREK C. BOK, responding to Bennett's remarks at Commencement.