Seniors Mourn Changes That Won't Affect Them

Six seniors were sitting around an Eliot House dining hall table last week. Conservation was listless. After one particularly lengthy pause, one senior piped, "Did you read about the new parietals?" Two others muttered, "Yeah." The silence resumed.

For graduating seniors, the draft apparently has not been enough. Harvard has seen fit to institute a series of changes in the College--all of which will take place next Fall.

Three major changes will greet those returning in September:

* Pass-fail. All students, including freshmen, will be allowed to designate one of their four required courses pass-fail. Individual instructors will decide whether students will be allowed to take their particular courses pass-fail. Many Harvard departments, however, have decided not to allow courses taken pass-fail to count toward concentration requirements. The major rationale for the plan had been that its existence would encourage students to take courses outside their majors and personal spheres of competence.

* Independent study. Sophomores and non-honors upperclassmen will be allowed to take independent studies--a freedom formerly restricted to honors juniors and seniors. Students will also no longer need the signatures of their own department chairmen or head tutors for independent studies, only those of the person sponsoring their work and, if it is a junior faculty member, that of his department's head tutor. Freshmen will still have to wait a year for this one.

* Parietals. New hours in the Houses will be 2 p.m. to midnight Monday through Friday, 11 a.m. to 1 a.m. Saturday, and 11 a.m. to midnight Sunday. For freshmen they will be 2 p.m. to 7 p.m. Monday through Thursday, noon to midnight Friday and Saturday, and noon to 8 p.m. Sunday. The new parietals actually give freshmen two hours more than upper-classmen on Friday--noon to 2 p.m.

In addition to these fairly sweeping alterations in the way things have been done at Harvard, there has been a wave of other changes.

Foreign Tongues

The language requirement, for example, has been reduced from two years to one. Those students who enter Harvard with-out having satisfied the requirement on a College Board Achievement Test in high school, must take a language course to pass the requirement in their freshman year.

Undergraduates next year will also have the opportunity to work out their problems (and perhaps a few frustrations) on computer consoles, which are scheduled to be installed in three Houses plus Sever Hall. The typewriter-sized consoles will connect into an SDS 940 in the Harvard Computing Center.

Mixers, in addition, will be changed for undergraduates in the Fall. The College has definitely nixed the mass, open mixers so beloved in the past. But no one seems to be quite sure of the compromise formula that Dean Watson's office is supposed to have come up with--designed to satisfy the outraged protests of students who will be back in the Fall.