17 



Revelle: Yes. He was a specialist on migration, rural to urban 



migration, or urbanization in general. His father had been 

 a professor at Harvard and he wanted to come back to 

 Harvard. He was a disaster as director of the center. He 

 didn't have any concept of how you organize a 

 multidisciplinary program. He wasn't interested. But he 

 was a moderately well-known scholar. 



About that time also, Howard appointed a committee to 

 review the center, a committee of demographers. 



Sharp: It sounds like trouble. 



Revelle: It was trouble, and I think they recoitmended that I should 

 be relieved of the job as director, but about that time I 

 became president of the American Association for the 

 Advancement of Science. Howard began to realize that I was 

 in fact one of their shining lights. 



Sharp: That was '73, I think. 



Revelle: Something like that, yes. '73 or '74. So he dropped that 

 idea. Also since I was about to retire anyhow. But, from 

 my point of view, he was a disaster as dean. 



Finally he got an associate dean named Elkan Blout who 

 was a very much more sensible guy, much more diplomatic, and 

 much more conciliatory. That, in the long run, pretty much 

 saved the School of Public Health. Hiatt was Derek Bok's 

 first appointment of a dean, so he stood up for Hiatt 

 against a kind of revolt in the School of Public Health by 

 many of the faculty members . 



Interestingly enough, that's typical of Harvard. 

 Harvard is not a democracy. It's run by a corporation of 

 five members, plus the president. It's called the President 

 and Fellows of Harvard College, a self-perpetuating body. 



Sharp: And they have quite a bit of — . 



Revelle: They run the place. Then, under them, each school has a 

 dean who controls the budget, unlike the University of 

 California deans who don't control anything. 



Sharp: Which is what you found out. 



Revelle: [laughing] That's right! 



I used to say that Henry Rosovsky, the dean of the 

 Faculty of Arts and Sciences, was the most powerful man in 

 the United States. In the long run I think that's right 

 because he was responsible for selecting, recruiting, 

 financing and retaining the heart of Harvard, the Faculty of 

 Arts and Sciences. 



The intellectual life of the country depends to a 

 large extent on what those guys think and write and do. So, 

 in fact, in that long-run sense, I think Henry Rosovsky was 

 a very powerful man, and before him McGeorge Bundy and 

 Franklin Ford and other people, Paul Buck, Ed Mason. 



