Gross Lays Out Report Details

The members of the curricular review committees have called for the replacement of the Core curriculum with a distributional requirement, pushing back concentration choice by a year and possibly switching to a Yale-style housing system, Dean of the College Benedict H. Gross ’71 told the Undergraduate Council last night.

Gross attended the council meeting as a guest speaker and used his time to summarize the curricular review’s formal report, written by Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education Jeffrey Wolcowitz, which is scheduled to be released today. Wolcowitz’ report is based on the findings of the four working groups of the curricular review.

Gross told the council yesterday that the committees wanted to break down the differences between honors and non-honors track concentrations, as well as work on giving students the opportunity to do a “capstone” project in their field of expertise that would not necessarily be a thesis.

“I think honors should be based more on the quality of their work, and right now, it’s more the quantity of their work,” he said.

Gross also said that the report suggests that students be allowed to fulfil their Harvard general education requirements either with two courses in four to five broad academic areas, or with their choice of Harvard College classes—“foundational courses in all these areas.”

“We’re going to propose that the Core be replaced,” Gross said at the Council’s weekly meeting.

Gross said he looked to Social Studies 10 as a possible paradigm for the Harvard College Courses and that a portion of these general education classes would likely be year-long.

“It’s more based on what some of the important things are in that field,” he said. “Harvard College Courses would be more how specialists get together and explain their subject to a generalist.”

Though the exact general education areas are still under discussion, Gross said he believed they would be the areas now delineated by the four divisional dean positions—the social sciences, life sciences, physical and engineering sciences, and humanities—as well as a general studies division, which would include a focus on international studies.

Along with this more flexible set of requirements, students will also have more time to mull over their eventual fields of study should the report’s suggestion to push back concentration choice—to the second semester of sophomore year—be accepted by the Faculty.

He added that the report proposes reducing that number of required concentration courses.

“The presumption will be 12 courses unless you need more,” Gross said.

Exceptions might include requirement-heavy concentrations, such as engineering sciences or biochemistry, both of which require up to 16 courses. Such departments would need to petition the Faculty’s academic deans in order to gain approval for their required course loads.

Gross also said the review wants to further look into the housing system in place at Yale University, in which first-year students are randomly assigned to residential colleges before they ever set foot on campus.

Gross cited alleviating of “the trauma of blocking” as one motivation for the proposal.

In an interview last night, one member of a curricular review working group said this issue had hardly been discussed in the committees.

“The most shocking thing in the final report was the proposed change to freshman housing. It is an issue fraught with problems, yet was barely talked about in the working groups at all,” the working group member wrote in an e-mail. “Decisions like these shouldn’t be taken without proper deliberation.”

Working group members were allowed to view the report last Thursday and were asked to submit any comment to Wolcowitz by yesterday.

Other issues Gross touched upon included the structure of advising at Harvard and the future of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) in Allston.

He spoke about the likelihood of a creating a central advising office that would be responsible for training advisers and coordinating the advising students get both before and after they elect concentrations.

“I want to get many, many more advanced faculty involved [in advising],” he said.

“We all know that no one person can advise us successfully here,” he added.

A task force within the working group on pedagogy also suggested that exams be moved to before winter break, Gross said, expressing his belief that doing so would provide more of a vacation for students, leading to less stress and eventually, fewer mental health issues.

“I think the calendar is the way to solve a mental health problem,” he said.

Gross said that among the groups’ other recommendations would be a proposal to make at least one semester of a foreign language mandatory for all students.

Council President Matthew W. Mahan ’05 said the council’s response to Gross’s summary of the report was overall a positive one.

“I think there was a very positive reaction,” Mahan said after the meeting. “On the whole, I feel Dean Gross has done a tremendous job at reaching out...and has made a really strong commitment to student input. He works [with] students on a much more equal playing field than other administrators have in the past.”

Mahan added, however, that he felt as though not as much emphasis was given to advising and to the quality of instruction as there should have been.

“It seemed like the quality of teaching and advising is really not as much of a priority as students would like it to be,” he said. “I think that students would put that as a top priority and the review put it more of the middle of the list.”

—Staff writer Laura L. Krug can be reached at krug@fas.harvard.edu.