Any increase in the size of the undergraduate body should depend primarily on the University's ability to build new Houses, Arthur Smithies, chairman of the Department of Economics, said yesterday.

"Physical limitations reduce expansion to a practical problem, and I don't think the College should expand at the expense of the House system," Smithies stated. "Consequently, any appreciable increase in size would be dependent upon the rate at which it could build new houses."

Smithies did not believe that such an expansion would affect academic standards. "The College has been expanding in recent years and is still a pretty good place," he continued.

The Economics Department could "take in its stride" the addition of one house, according to Smithies.

Although any increase in the size of the undergraduate body would necessitate a larger faculty, Smithies felt, the College would "always be able to maintain a first-class teaching staff, no matter what its size is." He noted that his department has to turn away many qualified students each year who want to do graduate work in preparation for a teaching career.

Rapid population growth makes expansion almost inevitable, Smithies explained. "If the College were to remain at its present size, its enrollment would become almost inevitably too unrepresentative of the country."

He opposed any expansion, "just for expansion's sake. If and when we expand, it should be because more qualified students want to come here, not because we want to become bigger."