Faculty Consider Pre-Registration

Students will be asked to pre-register for courses beginning next spring using a new online course planning tool, Dean of Undergraduate Education Jay M. Harris announced at yesterday’s Faculty Meeting.

Pre-registration—a non-binding indication of the courses a student plans to take—is intended to ameliorate some of the “predictable unpredictability” that currently plagues the process of assigning rooms, hiring teaching fellows, and placing book orders for courses, Harris said.

Students will indicate their course selections for the upcoming semester online through the existing Plan of Study tool, which was introduced this year in time for members of the sophomore class to declare their concentrations and indicate whether they plan to fulfill Core or Gen Ed requirements.

“Adults have difficulty navigating through this,” Harris said, as the faculty members looked through a printout of screenshots of the Web site, which links to the undergraduate Advising Network Portal, “but sophomores have no difficulty.”

Harris said that although an individual’s course selections are likely to change between pre-registration and Study Card day, the predicted class size tends to be within 5 percent of actual enrollment numbers—not substantial enough to affect section sizes.

Harris also called upon the Faculty to support the initiative by activating their course Web sites prior to the pre-registration date, which he tentatively set for November.

Harris said that the current unpredictable nature of class sizes has led the Faculty of Arts and Sciences to overspend on books, TFs and TAs, to the tune of over $1 million last year.

FAS has long sought to reduce these inefficiencies. Two years ago, administrators began working with pre-semester estimates to reduce the number of TFs hired at the last minute to accommodate larger-than-expected classes. According to Harris, TFs who are hired after the semester has begun are often among the lowest rated in the Q Guide.

And last spring, FAS announced that it would cut up to 10 percent of section leader positions for the fall 2009 semester by adhering more closely to the target of 18-person sections.

CONFLICTS OF INTEREST

The issue of financial conflicts of interest among faculty was also raised at yesterday’s meeting, as Harvard moves towards a University-wide policy in the face of what Vice Provost for Research David Korn ’54 described as increased financial scrutiny.

Korn responded to questions regarding the current draft of the new policy, formulated by a committee chaired by Korn over the last year.

The policy—in its 11th draft—focuses on protocol regarding relationships with outside parties when receiving financial support, primarily from federal funding. Korn estimated that faculty in the sciences will receive as much as $700 million in research funding next year, mostly from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation.

While each of Harvard’s schools currently have its own policies regarding financial conflicts of interest, Korn said that the committee chose to follow Stanford University’s lead and adopt a standardized policy across the entire University that still leaves room for flexibility on a school level.

English Department Chair James T. Engell ’73—who acknowledged that members of his humanities department were “relatively innocent of many of these financial conflicts of interest”—expressed concern that the wording of the draft was imprecise and left much room for interpretation.

But Korn said that more specific guidelines would develop through precedents and reaffirmed the importance of formulating a University policy, rather than allowing the government to dictate conflict of interest policy, a concern that has arisen in the past.

“I will assure you that it’s a lot better for us to regulate ourselves than to ask the government to do it for us,” he said.

—Staff writer Noah S. Rayman can be reached nrayman@fas.harvard.edu.

—Staff writer Elyssa A.L. Spitzer can be reached spitzer@fas.harvard.edu.