Summers Storm Could Sidetrack Review

If the Core survives Harvard’s three-year-old curricular review, the story of the effort to redefine undergraduate education here might one day be reading material for the Literature and Arts-A course, ”Tragic Drama and Human Conflict.”

With the review’s Educational Policy Committee (EPC) report just weeks away from full Faculty vetting earlier this month, engineering professors raised serious concerns about the report’s chief recommendations.

Then, the resurgence of tensions between University President Lawrence H. Summers and his Faculty critics once again diverted professors’ attention away from the curricular review.

Now, the EPC and Dean of the College Benedict H. Gross ’71 are looking for ways to revise the review’s recommendations that will satisfy natural and applied science professors.

Gross met professors from the Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences (DEAS) Tuesday, less than two weeks after the DEAS faculty voted to approve a series of statements criticizing key curricular review recommendations.

The meeting with Gross was “very cordial and constructive,” according to one attendee, Steven C. Wofsy, the Rotch professor of atmospheric and environmental science and a DEAS member.

Wofsy and other DEAS members still have some concerns about the curricular review’s plan to push concentration choice back to the middle of sophomore year, though Wofsy said the dean was “very receptive to the ideas we put forward.”

Members of the physics department expressed similar concerns about the concentration-choice delay at a Monday meeting, according to the department’s chair, John Huth.

These professors value the fact that the current system, which requires students to choose their concentration at the end of freshman year, places undergraduates in contact with departmental advisers early in their academic careers.

They worry that a delay in concentration choice without an improvement in pre-concentration advising might mean that science concentrators don’t take key prerequisite courses early enough.

Professors have proposed at least two solutions to this potential flaw in the concentration-choice delay.

First, physicist Gary J. Feldman, the Baird professor of science, suggested that science students could declare their concentrations at an earlier point in their undergraduate careers than their peers in the humanities and the social sciences.

Yale University already maintains a similar system. Sophomores interested in science majors are told to have their course schedules approved by a science department adviser, according to an official Yale website. Non-science students don’t have to declare their major until the beginning of junior year, according to the website.

Second, Professor of Economics David I. Laibson ’88, an EPC member, said, “the key in all of this is the advising system.”

“If you’re to get an engineering degree, you can’t leave it to sophomore year,” Laibson said.

Currently, many freshmen rely on their residential-hall proctors for pre-concentration advising.

“The really big problem in our advising system is that there are a lot of proctors who are advising people outside of the proctor’s area of specialty,” Laibson said.

He added that the EPC is considering a range of remedies, including increased faculty involvement in pre-concentration advising and the creation of a peer academic advising system.

As professors propose plans that would resolve the apparent impasse over concentration-choice delay, Laibson said he is “optimistic” that some of the EPC proposals will come to a full Faculty vote this spring.

But Laibson and other professors said it would be difficult to predict when the curricular review will return to the Faculty meeting agenda.

Dean of Faculty William C. Kirby, who has played a leading role in the review, announced his resignation last month.

“I think with Kirby resigning, the future is very much up in the air,” said Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology Steven Pinker, a member of the review’s Committee on General Education.

Pinker said that he and some of his colleagues aren’t disappointed by the review’s derailment. “Frankly, I wouldn’t shed any tears if it didn’t pass,” Pinker said.

—Staff writer Lois E. Beckett can be reached at lbeckett@fas.harvard.edu.

—Staff writer Johannah S. Cornblatt can be reached at jcornbl@fas.harvard.edu.`