Dunn's wit and arch humor are famous among administrators and students.

Delivering the annual Radcliffe lecture last month, Dunn remarked on the linguistic gap between her generation and today's students, drawing a wave of laughter from the audience.

"In New England, 'wicked' has resurfaced as an intensifier or term of approval, which for someone my age is really weird," she told listeners last month. "'Sketchy,' when applied to a new acquaintance, is definitely not a compliment--though what it is is not clear to me. My students tell me on the DL, or 'down low,' that I'm really random. Whatever."

Agreeable and diplomatic, Dunn has won friends in every quarter--even from those with competing visions for Radcliffe.

"She's naturally cheerful," says Richard S. Dunn '50, her husband of 39 years. "She gets other people to work for her, which I think is a valuable skill."

That skill will serve her well as the Institute tackles the knotty problems--the future of women's studies, the choice of a permanent dean--that will shape her tenure.

From a Two-Room Schoolhouse

Sturgeon Bay, Wis., where Mary Dunn was born in 1930, is wedged on a narrow peninsula jutting into Lake Michigan. Dunn attended classes in a two-room schoolhouse there until the start of the Second World War, when her father, a haberdasher, was drafted into the Army.