Pre-Registration Proposal Goes to Faculty Council

Harvard students could sign up for their fall courses in May instead of waiting for registration in the fall under a proposal presented to the Faculty Council yesterday.

Oscar Handlin, Pforzheimer University Professor, appeared before the council to urge a switch from Harvard's current fall registration to the type of spring "pre-registration" common at many other universities.

"I remember when we had it," Handlin said yesterday, explaining why he brought the proposal before the council. "It was much better."

Handlin added that the council did not seem to sense any contradiction between pre-registration and Harvard's long established tradition of "shopping around" for courses in the fall.

Explaining that choices made in the spring would not be binding, Handlin said, "we ought to have pre-registration in May; students can still change later as they do now."

After some discussion, the council decided to put the pre-registration proposal into the hands of Edward T. Wilcox, director of the program of General Education, and Marion Belliveau, Registrar of the Faculty, for further study.

Belliveau said yesterday she expected she and Wilcox would begin by seeking advice from schools that now run pre-registration.

Several council members suggested during the meeting that Harvard limit a pre-registration option to the University's very largest courses, Belliveau said.

These particular courses would benefit from pre-registration because their professors would have a better idea of enrollment figures when they prepared facilities and ordered materials.

"We'll also look into how much fluctuation there's been in the larger courses in the past five years, to see whether pre-registration would change" planning and locating classes for the following year, Belliveau said.

Continued Discussion

The council also continued its discussion of a student proposal for a new women's studies program.

For the fourth straight week the council failed to take any action on the proposal, which first appeared in a letter from an adhoc group of 20 women students to Dean Rosovsky last spring.