Under the report's recommendations, interdepartmental committees would scrutinize the material now offered in the required courses, hack out a lot of it, organize what's left into a logical sequence, and ask a large number of professors to lecture individually on a little bit. Departments would use time and manpower saved to offer a variety of electives.

The interdepartmental courses -- what the report calls the "core curriculum" -- would in effect form a sort of Gen Ed program for doctors. The core, the report says, would provide each student with "sufficient background and familiarity with each field to know when and how to return for further details when these may be helpful to him in his future work."

Electives would be small courses, like graduate seminars, exploring minute areas in depth. A professor could teach anything he wanted in an elective, and could throw as much detail as he desired at his students -- if he still had any.

To critics, the prospect is chilling; to some, it is the most objectionable idea in the report. It strikes them as a time-consuming system to plan, and painful to participate in. Explains one, people from different departments "don't normally see each other," the meetings would be difficult to arrange, and once they were held, everyone would wrangle for hours trying to cram into the "core" as much of their own subject as possible. "If you talk to anyone in any department, agrees another professor, "they'll say their subject fits right into that irreducible minimum."

Some courses, including a couple of current ones, have from time to time been taught by members of more than one department. But a number of men obviously would chafe if they had to teach under the proposed system. "When you get a committee telling me that I give a lecture on this one day and on that another day, I feel like a $50-a-day call girl," rasps one. "There's nothing here that belongs to me but two lectures in a smorgas-bord that a committee has put together."

Critics agree that "core" courses just wouldn't be good, though they offer wildly different explanations. One professor predicts that teachers would have to leave out all of the new and exciting but irrelevant developments in their field. "If you just left in the things that every doctor should know," he worries, "it would be unpalatable. It would be like eating sawdust." Another professor, however, is sure that lecturers would drop the essential in favor of the new and exciting. "If we didn't attract students