After five years at the school, I had... I had told the president that I would take the deanship for a period of five years, and then leave to go back to a medical setting where my training and previous experience had been. And, after four-and-a-half years I told the president that I was going to resign. He... he was really quite adamant in not accepting my resignation, pointed out to me that I had recruited a group of people who were new to the school and often new to the fields in question, who would be cast... might be cast loose if I were no longer there. He mentioned Harvey Fineberg and Milt Weinstein and Howard Frazier, Don Berwick and others, and I relented and stayed on.
Two years later, however, the... the majority of the faculty did ask the president to replace me, and he declined to do so. At that point I made one major change. The Associate Dean, who had been a member of the Faculty of Public Health for several decades, and whom I had asked to stay on with me as the... as my associate, but had never really been wholly persuaded that what was underway was in the interests of the school, he stepped aside and I replaced him with Elkan Blout, a Professor of Chemistry from the Harvard Medical School who remained with me throughout the remainder of my tenure as Dean, and stayed on after I left. In 1984, 12 years after my arrival, seven years after I said I would leave, I did resign and I went back to the medical school.