Twenty-Nine Undergraduate Departments: What They Teach and How They Teach It

"The cause of improved education," David Riesman has written, "would be enormously aided if some impartial yet 'fearless agency' could issue vivid and candid reports on colleges..."

That's us. For the first time anywhere the CRIMSON brings you a vivid and candid guide to the fields of concentration.

By now you should know that at Harvard you don't "major" in something; you "concentrate." To use the word "major" is like referring to the Yard as the "Campus" or calling the Porcellian a "frat." It isn't done.

Moreover, to concentrate doesn't mean devoting exclusive attention to one subject. Evn the most stringent course requirement demands only eight of your total 16 1/2 courses; this still leaves more than half of your academic time for exploring diverse curiosities and trying out new interests.

Some say it doesn't matter what you concentrate in, and to a certain extent this is true. Only a third of each Harvard graduating class goes on to a grad school of arts and sciences, where higher level study of a certain subject requires a specific background. Most of the other two-thirds go on to jobs or professional schools in law, medicine and business, where all kinds of liberal arts and science fields are acceptable.

Why then have a guide? Partly because freshmen are confronted with a confusing array of attractive fields, all offering different plans and advantages. Nobody can experience them all; so the guide attempts to give you some comprehensive and comparative basis for evaluating your 35 possibilities.

There is a guide also because some of the more fascinating small fields like Architectural Sciences and Astronomy, despite their excellent facilities and high faculty-to-student ratios, go unnoticed in the springtime stampede to sign up for one of the "mighty five"--History, Government, English, Social Relations, and Economics.

In addition, the guide attempts to provide a public evaluation of the qualitive aspects of Harvard education from the student's point of view. What does a student get out of concentrating in history, for example, and what does it take to succeed? What exactly is the Department's orientation, its method of instruction, and the state of faculty-student contact?

Finding pertinent answers to these questions means piercing beneath the Department stereotypes and routine data to seek out articulate informants. In this first issue, we have been more descriptive than critical, for the guide's primary function is not to praise or damn the departments, but to help freshmen reach a decision. But this beginning investigation should lead to further in-depth studies of the departments. And future guides, hopefully, can report not only what the departments are, but also what they ought to be.

Whatever field you pick, don't be afraid to change it later on. As Dean Monro said last week, "The main emphasis should be 'Does this really engage my interest or am I just going through the motions?'" Everybody has a roommate who fit right in from the beginning with Ec 1 and who will probably stick with it until he s an advisor to Presidents. But such combinations of temperment and luck are unusual compared to the frequent odysseys students take, say, from Chemistry to History and Science to Soc Rel and back to History. Happily, Harvard's curriculum permits lots of elbow room to move about.

Finally, a word of caution and an apology. Space limitations make it impossible to treat three of the smallest fields, Near Eastern Languages, Geological Sciences and Sanskrit; interested freshmen should consult the departmental offices. And remember that the guide, like the departments' PR men and your embittered senior friends, has a bias. Please don't believe everything we say.

Listen to everyone and then pick whatever department you prefer. If you can't find anything of special interest, explore different fields and change. You may not get a summa, but you will get a good education. And that is about all you can expect from a 330 year old university for $1760 a year.