Professors Hear Committee Summaries

After a year of work, members of four curricular review committees reported to the full Faculty of Arts and Sciences at its last regular meeting of the year yesterday, but the Faculty will have to wait until next year to fully discuss and vote on the recommendations.

Administrators now say they hope that faculty will vote on recommendations beginning next fall. With voting unlikely to conclude before next spring, most curricular review recommendations could not take effect before the fall of 2006, four years after the start of the review.

Seven of nine committees working on specific areas of the review have now officially released reports. And an eighth, the Committee on General Education, issued an oral report to the Faculty two weeks ago.

The Gen Ed committee’s final draft was not publicly released after it was strongly criticized by the Faculty Council—the Faculty’s 18-member governing body—at a March 9 meeting. Council members killed the report because they said it lacked a sufficiently defined guiding philosophy.

The Gen Ed committee plans on releasing a report next fall, after further discussion and review of the suggestions made by the committees that have already reported, according to Dean of the Faculty William C. Kirby.

When the review was launched in 2003, administrators had hoped that faculty would vote on the recommendations by this spring. But insufficient progress by the Gen Ed committee in particular and the fact that most Faculty meetings this semester focused on concerns over University President Lawrence H. Summers’ leadership rather than the review has pushed that timetable back.

To allow sufficient time for discussion of the review, professors yesterday voted to hold 14 Faculty meetings next year instead of the traditional nine.

Members of the Committee to Review the Teaching of Writing and Speaking, the Committee on Advising and Counseling, the Committee on Science and Technology Education, and the Committee on Pedagogical Improvement presented the key elements of their reports yesterday. Two weeks ago, the Committee on General Education and the Educational Policy Committee reported their recommendations.

The committees’ recommendations include abolishing the Core in favor of distributional requirements, moving the concentration choice deadline from the end of freshman year to the middle of sophomore year, and requiring all faculty to participate in undergraduate advising.

Presentations took up most of yesterday’s 90-minute meeting, leaving little time for faculty feedback.

Baird Professor of Science Gary J. Feldman said that in recommending integrated courses in the life sciences and the physical sciences, the Committee on Science and Technology Education had not provided an adequate framework for professors trying to create such classes.

“I for one could not derive from these examples [of courses] a set of principles for what a good course would be,” Feldman said.

He criticized the integrated science courses for not giving students the opportunity to build on basic scientific concepts.

Leverett Professor of Physics Gerald Gabrielse, a member of the committee, defended the new courses, saying that students would be able to explore complex topics that current introductory courses may not cover.

Young Professor of Sino-Vietnamese History Hue-Tam Ho Tai suggested that the Freshman Writing Tutorials recommended to replace Expository Writing should allow students to learn writing techniques for a variety of disciplines.

But English and American Literature and Language Department Chair James Engell, who presented that committee’s report, said that the writing courses should be focused on a single discipline, but that the particular knowledge students learn in these courses will be applicable across fields.

“Academic writing exists at a high level in all disciplines,” Engell said.

The Faculty yesterday also unanimously approved the 2005-2006 Courses of Instruction. Faculty members were told that they could view a draft version of next year’s Courses of Instruction at www.registrar.fas.harvard.edu/PrelimCourses. The user name is “courses” and the password is “52PickUp.”

—Staff writer William C. Marra can be reached at wmarra@fas.harvard.edu.

—Staff writer Sara E. Polsky can be reached at polsky@fas.harvard.edu.