Universities: Harvard's 31-Year-Old Dean

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Once scorned and now admired, Harvard's Graduate School of Education has honed some of the country's sharpest schoolmasters. It is nonetheless an administrative nightmare, with its 80 teachers and 700 students scattered all over Cambridge, some in ancient wooden houses. For 15 months the school has lacked a successor to ex-Dean Francis Keppel, who quit to become U.S. Commissioner of Education. And the school needs money. Harvard's President Nathan M. Pusey recently warned that next year it may be $500,000 in the red. Harvard abhors fiscally unbalanced deans, mused Pusey, who has been serving as Education's acting dean. "It would be amusing," he added, "if I were the first dean to be fired for this reason."

Last week the joke was on Theodore R. Sizer, a strapping, stripling Harvard education professor. At 31—and looking a bit young for some Radcliffe girls—he got Keppel's old job, and thus took a giant step forward in the U.S. academic procession. Not without qualms. The school has "one very big problem," he admitted. "A dean as raw as raw can be. This dean has to get out and make contacts in public education. He's got a lot of homework to do in the big cities, in the professional associations."

Obviously used to homework, Sizer is the son of Yale's mustachioed Pro fessor Emeritus Theodore Sizer, a splendidly offbeat art historian now serving as Yale's first "Pursuivant of Arms" (designer of college flags). Himself a Yaleman ('53), the younger Sizer first learned that he liked teaching when he became an Army gunnery instructor, later taught math and English at Boston's private Roxbury Latin School. By 1961 he was an assistant professor, with a Harvard Ph.D. in history and education. More important, he became director of the education school's main claim to fame, the Master of Arts in Teaching program, which turns able college graduates into high school teachers by feeding them a balanced diet of liberal arts and practice teaching.

Dean Sizer will go on teaching his course in "British and American Edu cation since 1870." But his real job lies in raising money, unifying the patchwork school and refocusing its mission. Sizer hopes to put even more stress on practice teaching, but in urban schools rather than the almost exclusively suburban schools that now feed off Harvard. Given the disarray of big-city schools—Boston's are a compelling example—it is high time for Harvard to help out. Happily, Sizer seems to be right on target.