Soc Rel Dept. May Break Up Again

The faculty of the Social Relations Department met last night but failed to reach a final decision on a proposal by R. Freed Bales, professor of Social Relations, to make the Social Psychology wing of Soc Rel a separate academic department.

The meeting had been called by George W. Goethals, chairman of the department, to discuss the problems of overcrowding and lack of sufficient funds that have increasingly plagued the department.

The meeting highlighted the period of crisis which the Soc Rel Department has been going through as a result of the department's lack of money to hire additional faculty.

"There are an average of 11 or 12 people in a sophomore tutorial," J. Lawrence Aber '72, a member of the department's Committee of Undergraduate Instruction, said yesterday. "Even junior honors tutorials have five or six students. And there is a real shortage of thesis advisers."

Bales's group has been arguing in recent weeks that the various branches of Soc Rel might be able to get more money from the Dean of the Faculty if they separated into independent departments.

"We have to tighten our organization," Bales said last week. "Each wing of the department must define what it needs and not bite off more than it can chew. That way we might be able to get more money from the Dean to hire more full-time faculty."

At the meeting last night, Bales presented the reasons behind the Social Psychologists' disillusionment with the Soc Rel Department and presented his proposal for the separation.

Committee

The department reached no decision, and Goethals formed a series of committees to look into the issue of whether or not the three branches of Soc Rel- Social Psychology, Social Anthropology, and Personality and Development- should remain together in one department. A decision is expected by the beginning of next term.

The Soc Rel Department, with nearly 700 undergraduate concentrators, is the second largest in the College. But it has only 38 full-time faculty members, and as Dennis L. Krebs, head tutor in Soc Rel, said last week, "we just don't have the faculty to properly teach our students."

The department staff was decimated last year when the Sociology wing of the department split off and formed an independent unit. Although this has not affected undergraduate concentrations, as undergraduates in sociology continue to major in Soc Rel, the split separated sociologists in Soc Rel into a separate department.

There are now 14 faculty members in the Sociology Department, for the approximately 70-80 Soc Rel students primarily interested in that field.

There are only 38 full-time faculty members for the remaining 620-630 undergraduate concentrators in Soc Rel.

Although no decision was reached last night on departmental reorganization, department members are working to improve undergraduate education in Soc Rel and to lower the student-faculty ratio of over fifteen to one.

"We're going to have to do something," Krebs said last week. "We just don't have the resources to teach the number of students who are concentrating in Soc Rel."