One of the most watched issues on campus this fall has been sexual harassment. A widely circulated campus survey on the subject revealed higher than expected rates of incidence of harassment.

Head On

Spence confronted the issue head on and said he would scrutinize it carefully over the coming months. He said the first priority for dealing with the issue was forming "some relatively specific guidelines with respect to behavior and make some process for dealing with the issue."

"It doesn't seem to me that it has been blown out of proportion. It raises an important set of issues," added Spence.

The new dean called the problem of minority underrepresentation on the Faculty a difficult and troubling issue, but he did not advocate any change of policy. He said that Harvard just had to "stay in the game" and keep trying to recruit qualified minorities, minorities.

One of the most complicated issues Spence will face in the next few years is how to use computers at all levels of instruction, research, and administration.

Central to the computerization riddle is what kind of equipment to buy. There are many different systems available on the market, but most of them are incompatible and the dean will face the problem of how to choose the one or ones that best suits the needs of the largest segment of the University.

Recently, some colleges and universities

Junior Faculty

Spence's selection comes after a 10-month search which Bok conducted almost entirely in private.

Bok said he offered Spence the job about two weeks age. The new dean said he accepted it a create of days later.

Imaginative

Associate Professor of Business Administrators Michal E. Porter, who has worked closely with Spence for a number of years on academic and administrative projects, called his appointment an imaginative one which will be respected in the College and in the graduate schools, especially the Business school, where he who hold here on Crand Professor of Economics and Business Administration.

"I do have some mixed feelings about this appointment however," Porter added. "I think there are other people around who could be the dean, but I'm not sure there are other people who could do the kind of research Mike does."

Rosovsky, too, had only high praise for a man who was one of his graduate students when he first came to Harvard in the late 1960s. The current dean said his main advice for his successor was to ready for the unexpected, and said that in one of their first meetings after Spence accepted the job he had passed along a piece of advice he had received when he first became dean.

Rosovsky said that Nobel laureate James Weston once told him." "You know the difference between a good dean and a bad dean is that a good one listens to gossip. By that he didn't mean gossip in the silly way, now I do and I think it's a good piece of advice."