Many conservative Faculty members felt especially hostile toward Senior Tutors during the late Sixties, when they thought the Administrative Board should have been punishing student radicals more severely. These political considerations probably damaged the Harvard career of Cornelis Klein, associate professor of Mineralogy and former Senior Tutor of Leverett House.

Klein had advanced higher on the ladder than Maier and Williamson. In July, 1969, the Geology Department raised him to the non-tenured rank of associate professor. In Spring, 1971, the Department recommended that he be promoted to full professor and be granted tenure.

When a department wants to hire an assistant or associate professor, the Dean of the Faculty must approve the choice. WHEN A DEPARTment wants to give a man tenure, more elaborate approval is required. An appointment without limit of time, which lasts an average of 34 years, is a more serious matter than a term appointment of three or five years. The President of the University must approve each tenure appointment. Ever since the Committee of Eight Report revised the system in 1938, the President has convened an ad hoc committee to advise him in his decision.

After a department meets and recommends a candidate for tenure, the department chairman must submit to the Dean a list of scholars, outside as well as inside the University. From that list, the Dean and President select an ad hoc committee to judge the proposed appointment. This ad hoc committee then considers a pile of written material prepared and collected by the department chairman. Such material includes letters from the chairman and other members of the department, opinions of scholars inside and outside the University, a biography and bibliography of the nominee, a description of the search procedure, and a discussion of why this candidate is the person best qualified for the job. Meeting with the President, the ad hoc committee then interviews the department chairman and other experts. Finally, the committee reports to the President, and the President decides.

The ad hoc committee procedure is designed to help the President judge a candidate's qualifications and ensure that the department has checked outside the University in searching for the most eminent scholar available. The system also helps watchdog the distribution of tenure appointments among the fields within a department. Sometimes a department selects more than one name and asks the President and the ad hoc committee to choose the best person. More often, it proposes one candidate and requests his confirmation.

On May 25, 1971, one month before leaving office, President Pusey vetoed Klein's appointment. Such a decision is always unusual. In Klein's case, it was especially surprising, since his department unanimously had recommended his promotion. Characteristically, Pusey's motives were a subtly blended mixture of academics and politics.

THE ACADEMIC question went beyond Klein's personal qualifications. In Fall, 1970, Dean Dunlop had created a committee to investigate the status of Geophysics in the Geology Department. Francis Birch '24, the Department's only tenured geophysicist, by then had already passed the retirement age. The small committee of scientists from outside and inside the University reported that Geophysics, the fastest growing and most glamorous area of Geology, was grossly understaffed at Harvard. It noted the abundance of Harvard mineralogists and suggested boosting Geophysics at the expense of Mineralogy. So one year after Klein became an associate professor of Mineralogy, with the assumption that his work met the University's standards and that "reasonable prospects of a permanency" existed, a special and prestigious committee was reporting to the President and Dean that Harvard needed more geophysicists and fewer mineralogists.

The special committee's recommendations were no doubt important. But senior members of the Department who testified before the ad hoc committee say that President Pusey himself played an extraordinarily energetic role. "He was clearly in command," one Geology professor recalled. Pusey easily dominated the men he had asked to serve on the ad hoc committee. One of these men had also sat on the special review committee.

One geologist speculated that his fellow Department members described Klein's virtues less emphatically when questioned by a President who obviously opposed the appointment. After one of Klein's backers reminded Pusey that Klein had conducted a good deal of research despite the time-consuming duties of the Senior Tutorship, the President reportedly snapped back, "Franklin Ford was a Senior Tutor, and he did all right."

Klein's performance as Senior Tutor hardly endeared him to Pusey. No one objected more than the President to the Ad Board's lenient treatment of disruptive student radicals. Pusey's distaste for Klein's politics probably provided the passion behind his academic objections to the appointment.

"The only thing that I find an unresolved problem is the non-reaction of the Department," Klein says in retrospect. "They had made two decisions: a promotion to associate professor, which was a unanimous decision, and then a unanimous decision to recommend me to the ad hoc committee. I find it odd that the Department in no way reacted." Klein thinks that the chairman could have appealed the verdict to a new judge, President Bok, who took office a month later.

If the Department had in fact not wanted to appoint Klein, it might very well have spared itself the unpleasantness of arguing his merits and simply sent his name to an ad hoc committee sure to shoot him down. Neither Klein nor his senior colleagues contend that is what happened. Such things have happened, however, in the History Department, which is notorious for its acrimonious debates and factional splits.

THE HISTORY Department had its full share of unpleasantness in Fall, 1969, when it debated the appointment of Fritz Stern, a German history professor at Columbia. David S. Landes, professor of History and Stern's good friend, supported the appointment enthusiastically. Oscar Handlin, Warren Professor of American History, led the opposing forces. As usual, the sides split roughly along the American and European divisional lines of the Department.

The Department recommended by a split vote that Stern be hired. The ad hoc committee was unimpressed, however, and President Pusey rejected the appointment.

Stern's supporters were bitter. They knew that Handlin had gone to the top to voice his objections. They also suspected that Franklin L. Ford, McLean Professor of Ancient and Modern History and former dean of the Faculty, was less than enthusiastic about the prospect of a new man encroaching on his territory of modern German history. They realized that if Ford had wanted the appointment, he was close enough to Pusey to guarantee its approval.