The announcement at the end of last month that Rosovsky will make his first major appointment--a new associate dean of the Faculty for Harvard and Radcliffe--signals an important step towards breaking down the centralization of the dean's office that grew under Dunlop. The new deanship is touted as having the clout to enforce decisions that formerly almost always went right to the dean himself.

Similarly, Rosovsky has given the Faculty Council wider responsibilities and the opportunity to serve as a sounding board for the dean's ideas. That move has probably contributed to a year in which political conflict played a negligible role in Faculty legislation. "I was never totally unaware of politics, but I can't think of any issue on which the votes [in the Faculty Council] broke down on the entirely conservative-liberal lines," Kiely said last week.

But Rosovsky has not made these moves purely to give himself more time to engage in contemplation, or primarily to reduce political conflict. Rather they stem from two of his oft-stated predilections: a desire for careful staff work on issues and a belief in self-government of the Faculty.

Rosovsky says he returned from sabbatical during last spring to find the Faculty at its May meeting last year voting to recommit a motion for a calendar revision to the Faculty Council. Faculty members wanted further study because numerous unanswerable questions came up on the floor debate. Rosovsky says that watching that meeting persuaded him that the Council must study legislation in more detail, with more extensive staff support, before passing it on to the full Faculty.

The Council, Rosovsky says, should serve both as a cabinet to the dean and as an elected, representative body of the Faculty. He has sought--with success most say--to confer additional legitimacy to Council decisions by bringing it into the decision-making process. But this has had its problems.

"The Faculty claims to believe in self-government, their actions often indicate the reverse," Rosovsky told one alumni group recently. The resistance of Faculty members to taking on administrative responsibilities, is not a "viable way of running the Faculty democratically." So by delegating more responsibilities to the Council and lower-level administrators, Rosovsky hopes to encourage more participation in administration. He truly believes in the idealistic nature of the university community that this implies.

Rosovsky's service as dean for this reason reflects an institutional loyalty to Harvard more than any personal ambition. The deanship is "not a culmination of my career," he says often. "I'm a believer in the John Quincy Adams principle," he adds, explaining his plans to return to teaching in the Economics Department after the five-to-seven year tenure he has set for himself. (John Quincy Adams, after his Presidential defeat by Andrew Jackson, served in the House of Representatives for many years thereafter.)

Rosovsky came to Harvard as a graduate student after graduating from William and Mary College. His experiences here, he says, "opened up vistas that can't, in a sense, ever be paid back."

Because much of Rosovsky's motivation in taking on the deanship stems from obligation rather than ambition, Rosovsky often comes across as ambivalent about his job. He jokes about it; but his comments like: "dean is a four-letter word," "deaning isn't fun," "being dean of the Law School would be a piece of cake"--after a while have a certain ring of truth.

Rosovsky says he is "slated to be the dean of the lean years," and that his tenure will be devoted to sorting out the Faculty's priorities. As this shaking out process continues along, Rosovsky will no doubt receive more attention as its engineer.

Rosovsky told one audience not long ago that the "dean must be an inveterate optimist, or undergo severe depression." With his job now structured so that the hard choices of budgeting are balanced by the broad range of the Redbook committee, Rosovsky, despite his ambivalence, has little reason to be any less than pleased. As Harvard grads mark their 25th reunion, Rosovsky celebrates his as a member of the class of 1949 at William and Mary. Rosovsky seemed only vaguely aware of the fact last week and said he was too busy at Harvard to mark the occasion at his own alma mater.