Sins of Catalogue

Every year about this time the University issues a catalogue of the courses to be offered during the following academic season. With the help of this slender booklet, instinct, and whatever odd knowledge he may have chanced to acquire over the lunch table, the student must make out his program for the next term. The nature of the catalogue is such that instinct and odd knowledge provide most of the guidance until the actual opening of classes, when many students shop for courses, jam into already over-crowded lecture halls, and deluge University Hall with a waterfall of petitions for course changes.

Not that the University makes any pretenses as to the nature of its little volume. Entitled an "announcement of courses," it is, with a few noteworthy exceptions, exactly that, and no more. The exceptions, however, provide a sparkling example of how informative and useful the catalogue could be. The General Education courses, for instance, offer not only the name of the course and professor and the number of the examination group, but also outline the general aims and give specific examples of the reading. A student who signs up for Humanities 3b gets a clear picture of what the course expects to give him, and how it expects to do it. Consequently, he is unlikely to change his mind about it after he has signed up, has a much clearer picture of what will happen to him next term and can plan the rest of his program accordingly. This informed person probably will add neither his name to the petition pile nor his person to the shopper horde.

The amount of information given varies in the different departments. Oddly enough, the worst offenders are among the social sciences: Economics, Government, and History offer only a title as a clue to the subject matter, while an exact science such as Biology gives a good summary. With a new catalogue impending, the various departments should go over their courses with an eye to describing them instead of merely announcing them. The resultant catalogue would be more than an academic menu, and less dishes would be rejected on first taste, to the mutual convenience of undergraduate and administration.