Jeeez, Talk About Uptight--Candidates for the presidency of Harvard can be a little uptight about publicity. Just ask Thomas Ehrlich, president of Indiana University and reportedly a candidate for Harvard's top post. When a Crimson reporter asked his office to send a photograph and some biographical information for an upcoming story, the office refused to send anything.

Take The Review, Please--At Dartmouth, not everyone is so fond of James O. Freedman '57, the college president who is also a top contender for Harvard's presidency. Just ask the folks at The Dartmouth Review, the school's notorious right-wing magazine and troublemaker. Review members, who have clashed with Freedman many times in recent years, say they are particularly excited at the prospect of Freedman's departure. "Please take him," said Ben Shim, the Review's president.

A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Words--One footnote to the Dartmouth story: In the spirit of a free press, Shim said he would be kind enough to fax The Crimson vital information about Freedman's candidacy. Shim subsequently faxed over a photograph of a naked woman apparently taken from a recent issue of Playboy. Good to see The Review is upholding its commitment to high quality journalism.

Us? Arrogant?--At the University of Chicago, at least, folks aren't so hypersensitive about the presidential search. Although the school has two curious ties to the search--Chicago President Hanna H. Gray is on the search committee and Chicago Provost Gherard Casper has emerged as a leading candidate--Geoffery Stone, dean of Chicago's law school, insists "There's no effect. Only at Harvard would people think that their search has an effect on other campuses."

Before His Time--It seems that author Michael Crichton '64 is already making an impact on Harvard's Board of Overseers, to which he was elected last June. When the Board began discussing computer technology for the University last weekend, Crichton, who wrote the The Andromeda Strain, a novel about high-tech efforts to fight an extraterrestial microbe, was especially interested. According to another overseer, "There's nothing [being developed now] that wasn't in the The Andromeda Strain 25 years ago."

Huh?--When the Department of Education announced this week that it would cut federal funding to any school which doled out scholarships based on race, observers naturally assumed the decision had come from higher up. After all, everyone knew that race was a pet issue for new Republican Party Chair William Bennett. In fact, many thought Bennett would turn race into a central issue in the 1992 campaign. But then Bennett turned down the GOP job at the last minute, and word leaked out that Bush didn't even know about the decision beforehand. As a result, educators are now hoping that Bush, who is "reviewing" the decision, will be no more stubborn about this decision than he was about his "no new taxes" pledge.

"Unless there is a dramatic increase in the number of Blacks and Hispanics and Native Americans receiving Ph.Ds, there is not going to be a significant increase in the number of faculty members who come from [these groups]. Strong efforts have to be made to increase Ph.D. recipients. The [decision] by the Department of Education seems to run counter to that effort."

--Daniel Steiner '54, Harvard's vice president and general counsel, on the government's decision to cut federal funding to schools with race-based scholarships.