'A Socratic Gadfly'

Getting ahold of Burton S. Dreben '49 is like playing a shell game.

You might try his Emerson Hall office, where he works as Pierce Professor of Philosophy. You could call University Hall, where Dreben serves as special assistant to the Dean of the Faculty. Or you could drop by 78 Mt. Aubum St., headquarters of the prestigious Society of Fellows, of which Dreben is in charge.

But the chances are you won't find him anywhere Dreben, one of the Faculty's busiest members, seems to travel from role to role in a blur that rarely materializes in any one office.

Elusiveness suits Dreben fine. "He is not a person who seeks the limelight. If he had a choice, he would rather be, as the Japanese say, behind the screen," says Dreben's administrative boss and close friend. Dean of the Faculty Henry Rosovsky

Dreben's behind-the-screen activities have led to his reputation as one of the most powerful members of the Faculty, a reputation even he is hard pressed to dismiss. "I am constantly aware that someone in my position could seem to have some kind of undue influence," Dreben says. "Over the past 11 years I have played the role of being a serious advisor to the dean one of several," he adds.

Rosovsky simply calls Dreben "a powerful voice in the dean's office"

Ad Hoc Committees

The chief source of Dreben's power is his role of assembling scholars to sit on Harvard's ad hoc committees. These are groups composed of both inside and outside professors, which review every departmental tenure nomination and make a recommendation to President Bok

The committees are very influential and each year habitually help Bok to decide to turn down three or four of the approximately 20 nominations advanced by the departments for the lifetime positions. They are supposed to be independent sources of counsel designed to guard against departmental "insidership" in pushing a particular candidate.

But professors acknowledge that Dreben's unusual task of drawing up these committees and serving on them ex officio gives him unusual influence in batting down a department's nomination.

"There is no room for him to be kingmaker. There is room for him to be a destroyer of excessive ambitions," says John D. Montgomery, chairman of the Government Department, who deals periodically with Dreben on appointment matters.

For his part, Dreben says, "I know at times I have been criticized for perhaps showing bias. But--and I don't want to sound Pollyannish--all of us engaged in the process try very hard to get as strong an independent committee as we can."

"If a department really wants to fool the president and dean, it can do it," Dreben adds. "I don't sit there like some intelligence officer."

Dreben, in general, likens his administrative duties to those of "a glorified clerk." His appearance seems to bear out this characterization. Short and balding at 56 years of age. Dreben sits behind a huge desk in his Emerson Hall office, surrounded by swarms of paper, manuscripts and envelopes--many of them stamped "Confidential."

But behind Dreben's unprepossessing appearance is a mind described as sharp, broadminded--and unconventional And his influence is by no means limited to tenure matters

Even though he never received his Ph.D. Dreben is one of the most highly respected and sought-after members of the Philosophy Department--by professors and graduate students alike. And as head of the Society of Fellows, he runs the select Harvard organization that brings highly promising graduate students here for three free no-strings-attached years of pure research.

Dreben is also a close friend of Rosovsky's and a long-standing member of the dean's small "kitchen cabinet" of academic deans. This council--which also includes, among others, Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education Sidney Verba '53 and Dean of the Graduate School Edward L. Keenan '57--carries much of the Faculty's administrative load.

Dreben's friendship with Rosovsky dates back to the early 1950s, when both were junior members of the Society of Fellows. After his three-year stint at the Society. Dreben went to teach at the University of Chicago for a year before returning in 1956 to Harvard's Philosophy Department, where he has been ever since.

Dreben was able to win a teaching position despite his lack of Ph.D. because of his stint in the Society of Fellows. And he says that the lack of a Ph.D. has never hurt him professionally.

Dreben's field is a combination of logic, philosophy and mathematics. But while he has published numerous articles in logic, he has published not a word in philosophy proper.

"He is one of those people who writes and sticks it in the drawer," says Hilary Putnam, Pearson Professor of Modern Mathematics and Mathematical Logic. Partially because of the penchant for secrecy, colleagues say, his beliefs about philosophy are highly controversial and not entirely accepted in philosophy departments around the country.

Dreben has been at work for a number of years on reinterpreting several 20th century figures in analytic philosophy, a field "which has invented a false history of itself," says Putnam. Dreben, he says, "is lifting the rug up to see what actually happened and why."

Dreben says he isn't worried in the least about his output. The manuscripts he keeps in locked files in his Emerson Hall office are simply not ready for publication. "I keep rethinking them...I find it difficult to come to any final conclusions."

Socratic Gadfly

While Dreben may not be known for his publications, he has created a name for himself as an intense, highly original teacher.

Because he teaches only graduate-level classes these days. Dreben is all but unknown among undergraduates. But graduate students in the department say he is highly thought of--as evidenced by the disproportionate number of Ph.D. candidates in Dreben's fields.

"He calls himself mockingly 'a Socratic gadfly,'" says one Philosophy graduate student, who asked not to be identified, "but it is accurate."

"He asks the disturbing questions.... You realize that you have to come to terms with something you would like to avoid," the student adds "He is someone who shakes people up He makes people upset, but in a good way, because it makes you think," says another student of Dreben's who also asked to remain anonymous.

Dreben's teaching strategy, particularly in small classes, is to probe the sources of students' ideas, students say.

A conversation cited by University of Virginia philosopher Cora Diamond illustrates Dreben's intellectual approach.

"We were discussing whether another philosopher had enough originally, and [Dreben] said, 'I despise originally,'" she remembers, saying he was combatting "the false notion that a philosopher has to come up with an original idea every other week."

"He said exactly the opposite of what anyone might expect him to say, and he said it very impressively," she adds. "What he was doing was forcing you to think about what you mean by philosophy."

Administrative Load

But for the last 15 years, Dreben has not always had enough time for philosophy because of the heavy--and diverse--administrative load he has carried.

His first position was Faculty parliamentarian, a job he took in 1969, a time when the Faculty was politically polarized and facing divisive issues like the school's ties with the federal government and the military. He was consistently barraged with questions of procedure during the series of contentious Faculty meetings held during that period.

"There was a parliamentarian before me, but it wasn't a position that was very demanding," Dreben says. "When topics at Faculty meetings became issues that were so large and substantial, it became rather essential to have much more formality."

Dreben left the job in 1973, when incoming Dean of the Faculty Henry Rosovsky asked his friend to head the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS). But Dreben still remains the authority on legislative matters at Faculty meetings. For instance, at the Faculty's last meeting on February 14, it was Dreben to whom Bok turned for a judgement of order in the debate over the Reserve Officers Training Corps.

In this three years on the job, Dreben carried GSAS through a painful period of shrinkage owing to financial stringencies. His principle legacy is the current financial aid plan, which offers admission only to as many students as the school can afford to aid.

"That's a plan that he was more responsible for than anyone else," says Rosovsky. "It is a plan that is not overwhelmingly popular among the Faculty, because it limits the number of graduate students."

After steering the GSAS through "a very critical juncture in the graduate school's history," as he terms it, Dreben took a year of leave from the Faculty to settle into his new position as chairman of the Society of Fellows, which he still holds.

The next year, 1977, Rosovsky again tapped Dreben, this time for his current position, special assistant to the dean, which is where his role in the ad hoc process comes in.

Because "the people you want are the very people who are booked up years in advance," according to Dreben, it takes at least six weeks to convene an ad hoc committee. But Dreben adds that he is constantly amazed that the process runs so smoothly and defends it as a principle guarantor of the quality of Harvard's Faculty.

"The whole system rests on the goodwill of very distinguished people at other institutions," he says. "It is hard to believe since we are so cynical, but there is a great deal of integrity in the ad hoc process," he says.

Professors say that Dreben's wide-ranging academic background reinforces his administrative duties, which also include making certain that the department's dossier of a tenure nomination is complete. This is the file of papers the department assembles to buck its case for a tenure nomination.

Dreben downplays this role, saying that he only "makes sure that the case satisfies the paper standards,"--nothing substantive.

"He has a nice logician's view of how to present a case," says Montgomery of the Government Department. "He knows what kind of evidence should be marshalled, and he has an instinct for a nicely paced argument."

"He has a wry way of cutting through academic obfuscation," adds James S. Ackerman, chairman of the Fine Arts Department.

Dreben does not seem to have any compunctions about applying his logical insightfulness to tenure cases. In addition to reviewing the dossiers and choosing ad hoc committee members. Dreben says he participates actively in the ad hoc meetings themselves.

"I might make a comparison between this case and another case, or ask questions," Dreben says. "I feel obliged to bring out the [historical perspective], but the dean also does that. We work in tandem."

Rosovsky and others who know him say that Dreben is aided in his tenure responsibilities by his capacity to keep abreast of a wide range of fields.

From his days in the Society of Fellows, Dreben has contacts in every field whom he says he calls on for advice on particular tenure cases.

"He knows the University and the departments in a way one couldn't learn by any other method," says Roderick Firth, Alford Professor of Natural Religion, Moral Philosophy, and Civil Polity.

Dreben complains jovially about the burdens of all his administrative responsibilities--which he calculates take more than 58 percent of his time.

But he says he feels the self-administration of the Faculty requires that he and others sacrifice other pursuits. He explains: "I think it is essential that major faculties be self-governed. That means that a number of professors have to spend a certain amount of their careers helping to administer their own faculties."

"There is always some slight--and sometimes, not so slight--suspicion about a professor who spends time in administration," Dreben adds, but he says that situation is better than the alternative--unsympathetic professional administrators.

Dreben "is not a person who seeks the limelight. If he had a choice, he would rather be, as the Japanese say, behind the screen."

-Henry Rosovsky