Council Urges Rudenstine To Enrich Life in Houses

President-designate Neil L. Rudenstine is getting more mail from the Undergraduate Council.

In its general meeting last night, the council voted to send a third letter to Harvard's next leader, this time calling for steps to increase interaction between faculty and students in the 12 undergraduate houses.

The letter recommends that each house offer at least one seminar per year and that all Core classes with more than 200 students provide at least one section in some house. It also suggests that a faculty member affiliated with a house should attend at least one meal there every two weeks. In addition, the letter requests that those faculty members make annual presentations of their academic work to their houses.

"Most students in houses never see faculty members," said representative Daniel H. Tabak '92, who introduced the letter. "This was not the original concept of the houses."

Council members presented the recommendations at a Committee on House Life meeting in early April. There, house masters expressed support for the sugges- tions, Tabak said.

Tabak said that the letter should be sent to Rudenstine before he meets with house masters on May 2.

The council's first letter to Rudenstine invited him to speak before the undergraduate body. Its second letter delineated specific issues that council members hope Rudenstine will address, such as greater dialogue between students and administrators, and an increase in faculty diversity.

In other business, the council voted for a proposal to condense exam periods by two days, increasing the length of intersession.

The vote came after the council conducted a campus-wide poll to gauge support for the proposal. Of the 315 students polled, 73.4 percent supported the proposal.

But some council members said they thought students polled might not have realized that a condensed exam period meant that exams would be more closely packed.

"You are going to put a lot of exams next to each other, which makes studying for exams much harder," said council member Malcolm A. Heinicke '93.

If the proposal is passed by the Committee of Undergraduate Education and the Faculty Council later this month, it could be implemented as soon as next fall, according to the council's academics chair, Steven N. Kalkanis '93.

Kalkanis said that if the proposal is approved, students may have greater clout with the administration in reforming the school calendar.

"It's sort of a foot in the door," Kalkanis said, "It's a beginning.