Faculty Additions Feed Steady Growth in Course Offerings

At some academic institutions, talk of raising the number of courses required to graduate would send Faculty into a frenzy to beef up the courses catalog.

However, at Harvard, preliminary discussion of changing the number of required courses from 32 to 34 or 36 hasn't sent those counting classes in the one-and-a-half pound Courses of Instruction scrambling; there are already plenty of general course offerings.

Harvard, a place saturated with tradition, prides itself on regular patterns and using what works. The 155-page course catalog from 50 years ago uses the same divisions in types of classes and professor limits that the 787-page course catalog today uses. The mathematics sequence of 1a, 1b, 21a and 21b that appears in the 1966-67 catalog is still followed by today's premeds.

And while Registrars have scrambled to keep up with an ever-expanding course list, the wide variety of classes available is one of the benchmarks of the world-class education Harvard offers.

Clear patterns are set in the Courses of Instruction: historically large social science departments like government, economics and history have often topped 75 classes offered per year.

At the other end of the scale, the Department of Celtic Languages and Literature has been consistently diminutive, never offering more than 20 classes in a year.

Professor of Law Derek C. Bok, who served as president of the University from 1970 to 1991, says the growth of classes is closely tied to the growth of the Faculty.

"The number of Faculty hasn't grown and Faculty teaching loads have gradually drifted downward," Bok says, hypothesizing that the larger increase in the number of classes Harvard saw in the late '60s and early '70s was due to the growing number of Faculty members.

"Faculty size has the greatest impact on the breadth and number of courses that can be offered," says Michael S. Flier, the chair of the Department of Linguistics.

According to Dean of the College Harry R. Lewis '68, the Capital Campaign dollars for new professorships will be targeted at those departments in need of more teaching staff.

Bok says the greatest increase in courses he remembers came with the introduction of the Core. (See story, page B-1.)

"You can see the difference with a major curricular change, however," Bok says. "With the [introduction of the] Core we had to come up with over 100 modified or new courses...so there was some net increase."

Though departments have stayed relatively steady in their offerings over the decades, the number of departments has changed. The Environmental Science and Public Policy and Womens Studies concentrations are new within the last decade, and Computer Science and Visual and Environmental Studies have also emerged within the past 50 years. (See story, page B-10.)

Meanwhile, the departments of Social Relations and Semitic Language and History, present in the 1946-47 catalog, have become the Sociology and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, respectively. The Department of Geology and Geography, which had 34 classes in 1946-47, has been assimilated into a number of departments.

Cataloging Change

Fifty years ago, only the introductory courses had a paragraph description designed to entice undecided first-year students to a department. Departments would also provide a short paragraph of advice on which courses to take.

The advice from departments exited the Courses of Instruction and moved to a new publication, the Fields of Concentration, in the early 50s, about the time most course heads first submitted a descriptive paragraph for publication.

One significant difference between the 1946-47 Official Register and the current editions is the absence of bracketed courses--classes planned for the following year. These were not to reappear until the Faculty voted to terminate the campus state-of-emergency provisions in place during the war effort.

Though some departments, such as Chemistry and Mathematics, have very few to no bracketed courses, others, such as History and Romance Languages and Literature, have a considerable number of bracketed courses.

However, the page growth in the Courses of Instruction cannot be attributed to bracketed courses as much as growth in the Faculty, mostly due to new departments.

Senior Lecturer in Physics Margaret E. Law, who served as registrar from 1978 to 1989, says she, like the other registrars, have little control over what the catalog contains.

"We basically took what came in and put it into the catalog," Law says. "We pushed for the departments not to list things twice because it really pads the catalog.... We always tried to cut down and streamline but the catalog always got bigger and bigger every year."

During Law's tenure as registrar, almost every department had full year introductory courses, a practice Law attempted to stop.

"I remember I tried very hard to switch departments from full courses to half courses," she says. "Students did benefit [from the change], but we primarily did it for administrative reasons," she says.

One major culprit in packing the catalog seems to be the Division of Medical Sciences, a listing of classes and Faculty for graduate students in the sciences. The committee, an associate group of the Medical School, offers no classes for undergraduates and takes up 51 pages in the 1996-97 Faculty of Arts and Sciences catalog. Ten full pages of that is solely devoted to listing their Faculty.

Departments Choose Courses

Law points out that the departments and department chairs have the most impact on the number and type of classes offered.

Dale W. Jorgenson, Abbe professor of economics and chair of the economics department, agrees, though he says he tries to allow other members of the department to provide vital input.

"I superintend," Jorgenson says. "We decentralize things quite a bit here," he said of the economics department, traditionally one of the largest concentrations.

"We have different subheadings in the catalog and these groups get together and decide what they want to offer," Jorgenson explains. "I only get involved when there is a gap in teaching a required class or a similar problem."

The number of classes under the economics section has dipped slightly in recent years.

"We probably have less classes than in the past," Jorgenson says, "but with a considerable rate of variety."

However, Jorgenson stresses the department's ability and willingness to offer topical courses from younger Faculty who are excited about their subject, and says the decrease in the number of courses may actually demonstrate a greater commitment of Faculty to undergraduate education.

"Though classes have been getting larger because the concentration is getting larger, we have gradually decided to concentrate on basics, teaching economic theory and econometrics," Jorgenson says. "These courses can involve as many as four professors."

Furthermore, he says, "People are more and more committed to individually supervising student research, in terms of theses," therefore spending more time with concentrators than if they were simply teaching another lecture class.

Classic Memories

Past and present graduates agree that providing a large quantity of high-quality classes is something Harvard does well.

"I think there were plenty of classes," says William S. Shin '97. "There were way too many to get a sampling of them, but in a good way."

Rita R. Riley '47 says that the tutorial system was the key to her educational experience, and that despite the war, "I could still take whatever I wanted."

Alumni say they remember the variety of classes in the course book was almost overwhelming.

"I remember as a freshman looking at the course catalog," says Joseph D. Halpern '67. "I was reading about a class on the early philosophy of Wittgenstein. I remember thinking who was Wittgenstein and why does he have any early or late philosophies?.... There was a lot of choice."

Halpern says he feels the classes available when he was here were more than satisfactory--they were entertaining.

"I had tremendous choice," Halpern says. "There were always easy classes that were popular and en vogue."

"There was a class called 'Frogs and Flicks' taught by Lawrence Wiley. That was a class basically on French culture that showed a movie every week."

"Everyone went to the class to watch the movies," Halpern says. "Nothing changes."

The Value of Brackets

One of the aspects of the book that has come under the most criticism is the bracketed courses, those courses listed in the department that are projected to be offered in future years.

Omar M. Siddiqui '97 says that bracketed courses, often touted as an aid for planning a course of study, led him wrong when a language class, Urdu 104: "The Classical Urdu Ghazal and Its Symbolism," remained bracketed for his entire undergraduate career.

"For four years it was in the course catalog but never offered," Siddiqui says. "I always wanted to take it from my first semester."

However, Siddiqui says this case is atypical. "Generally, bracketed courses are good to help structure your curriculum but it is obviously pointless if it is never offered."

Shin, who concentrated in Biochemical Sciences, says bracketed courses as a whole are "just confusing."

"I think they should only put in the courses for that year," Shin says. "Why show a class if it is not offered that year?"

Halpern says he remembered bracketed courses from his years at the College, but they were more of a help than a concern.

"It was not a big deal that there were bracketed classes that were offered every other year," Halpern says.

"There were a lot of visiting professors who had seminars," Halpern addd, which he says helped fill in when other professors did not teach their classes.

Bok says that bracketed classes are really a reflection of the needs of the Faculty for sabbaticals or other time away from teaching.

"The real question to ask is how well is it managed by departments and how difficult it is on students," Bok says.

Bok also says that to ensure a reasonable number of classes are offered, departments must make sure all of the professors teaching in one area do not go on leave at the same time, as happened in the Moral Reasoning subfield of the Core this year.