Rise in Seminar Applicants May Prompt Use of Lottery

A 15 to 25 per cent rise in the number of applicants to the more popular courses in the freshman seminar program has placed an increased administrative burden on many seminar leaders--a burden so severe that some of the seminar leaders are considering a random lottery as a means of choosing among applicants.

Most seminar leaders contacted yesterday reported that the rise was part of a trend of burgeoning applications for the more popular seminars over the past three or four years.

Four seminar leaders said they were considering some form of lottery instead of the current process, which involves a written application and an interview.

Among them was Katherine Auspitz'63, associate professor of Social Studies, who received almost 20 per cent more applications for her seminar this year than last year.

"In some of the courses where there are no prerequisites, the interviewing process is rather arbitrary. There's little information to go on," she said.

Auspitz said she plans to discuss the lottery suggestion with Susan Lewis, assistant director of the freshman seminar program, sometime in the future.

Lewis said yesterday she would recommend against the use of a lottery, but that the actual method of selection used was the prerogative of each seminar leader.

Edward T. Wilcox, director of the freshman seminar program, could not be reached for comment yesterday.

At the same time as the number of applicants has increased, the number of seminars being offered has declined to 56 seminar terms, down from 63 last year.

Reapplying to Harvard

"It's like getting into Harvard," Robert Coles, lecturer in General Education, said yesterday. Coles' seminar on the ethical problems associated with political and social action had about 150 applicants this year for ten places.

Coles was forced to spend the first week of courses selecting and interviewing applicants for his seminar. Some applicants went so far as to send un- solicitated letters of recommendation from public officials, and to seek Coles out in person before registration.

Besides soliciting a written application and an interview, most seminar leaders also try to maintain a diversity of backgrounds in their classes.

Some seminar leaders--Coles and Robert Amdur, assistant professor of Social Studies, for instance--choose their classes with racial diversity in mind. Others aim for heterogeneity of region, sex and family income.

The smaller seminars have not experienced a similar rise in applicants. Herbert W. Levi, professor of Biology, has given his one-person laboratory seminar on spiders for about five years