Faculty Okays New Degree And Sets Research Limits

The Faculty passed legislation yesterday giving Harvard and Radcliffe undergraduates the option of a B. S. in engineering instead of the A. B. The Division of Engineering and Applied Physics introduced the motion as part of an effort to induce more high school students interested in engineering to come to Harvard.

Members of next year's entering class will be given a choice between the two degrees.

The Faculty also adopted a motion setting guidelines for accepting outside research grants. While specifically barring the University from accepting classified research, the statement does not restrict the outside activities of individual Faculty members.

The B. S. degree at Harvard is presently given only to the holders of the A. B. after a year of graduate work. It is considered the first professional degree for the practicing engineer.

In introducing the motion. Bernard Budiansky, McKay Professor of Structural Mechanics, argued that the proposed B. S. degree would be interdisciplinary enough to provide a broad undergraduate education.

Under the new program, a student can earn the B. S. by taking 11 courses in the Division of Engineering or related areas. This would leave five-and-one-half courses in the undergraduate program to complete General Education requirements. The option of completing the degree in a postgraduate year will be left open.

The motion passed with about two minutes of debate.

The resolution on research, approving a report written by a committee under the direction of Harvey Brooks, dean of Engineering and Applied Physics, was a codification of existing explicit and implicit Faculty policies. It contains no new restrictions and was passed with little debate.

The new "Criteria for Acceptance of Sponsored Research" require that:

the source of sponsorship and purpose of all research must be available to the public;

the University will not accept research with security classification, research requiring security clearance of employees, or research whose results cannot be published;

those conducting the research have the right to publish it or not to publish it, without the approval of the sponsor;

no research by an individual Faculty member contains any implied Harvard endorsement:

any research agreement between the University and an external sponsor must have obtained some form of sanction in advance to insure that it con-forms to University principles and doesn't conflict with the rights of others;

all research conducted on living animals and human beings must follow long-established University safeguards.

The Faculty rejected an amendment by E. Bruce Brooks, assistant professor of Chinese, requiring Faculty approval for research involving "a significant institutional commitment."

The Faculty spent the first hour and a quarter of their two-hour meeting discussing new procedures proposed by the docket committee for the conduct of Faculty meetings. The 29 proposed new rules-covering eight pages of single-space type-are supposed to simplify the Faculty's oft-labyrinthine procedure.