THE Visual and Environmental Studies Department has an identity problem before it even exists. For years they have been trying to sell their value to men of letters. And this year, when the Faculty finally made them a department, they found they've got their image wrong with students.

About three times as many freshmen as they can handle have applied to the department this year. As of Tuesday evening 56 had signed up for interviews to discuss concentration with members of the department. The Faculty had planned the program for only 20 or so from each class. And they can't easily expand it.

The Vis Stud Department was formed as a derivative of the undergraduate Architectural Sciences Department, which will dissolve as soon as this year's Arch Sci juniors and sophomores graduate. The new department expected about 20 students to apply because that's how many applied to Arch Sci. The course requirements haven't changed so drastically, but the departmental promotion propaganda has.

Arch Sci always had about twice as many freshmen interested as eventually concentrated; but the major was played down. Its existence was even more ambiguous than Vis Stud's. Being part of the Graduate School of Design, the program's requirements and tutors geared studies to architecture and background knowledge essential to becoming an architect.

But Arch Sci concentration interviewers used to tell people who said they wanted to be architects to go major in physics or government and pick up their design in grad school. Their advice was good, because physics is just what people who are going to build buildings have to know. But this approach left them teaching architecture to those who would design things other than buildings, a few dilettantes, and a good many others who planned amorphous nonprofessional visually creative careers.

Teaching the Nitty Gritty

A lot of the old concentrators took course after course at the VAC and added them to their Arch Sci credits. Up until now that was the closest you could come to majoring in Vis Stud. The Fine Arts Department would often give credit for VAC courses, but Arch Sci even taught the nitty gritty of its own basic requirements, Arch Sci 20-21, and 30-31, at the Carpenter Center.

City Planning--one of the three fields you could specify within Arch Sci, the others being architecture and landscape architecture--is one of those romantically sociological - sounding fields of study, like International Law, that really doesn't exist. That is to say there are no international laws to study; one studies how the politics of different countries interact with their own national laws. In the same way, there are no men who plan cities, only those who design individual buildings, bridges, parks, while cosidering how their efforts will affect the overall environment.

City Planning used to draw a lot of disaffected concentrators looking to tie in sociological study with action--in this case, design. But Arch Sci kept its numbers down by telling them what city planning really was and handing them the confusion about not majoring in architecture if you want to be an architect. Still, City Planning was way over-subscribed.

UNFORTUNATELY for Vis Stud, it got too much great publicity when it became a major. And freshmen are missing the message on Vis Stud the same way they used to miss it with City Planning. Some have come frothing to their advisors claiming their right to concentrate in the field of their choice at Harvard, to which advisors have answered mostly with comparisons to other limited majors like Social Studies and History and Lit.

The name is now Visual and Environmental Studies (some people have started circulating the new nick-name "Envy Stud"). The members of the department consider it a human and social determinant (like psychology or economics), not just an aesthetic. "Changes in man's physical environment usually have visual consequences," writes Eduard Sekler, new chairman of the department and director of the Carpenter Center. "Visual communication tends to impinge more and more on the physical environment and to modify it."

The Goals of an Aesthete

But the emphasis on sociology is misleading to a potential concentrator who will spend the gut of his concentrating time--his studio work and his thesis project--creating projects to achieve the goals of an aesthete. Even the required lecture courses are on the principles and psychology of visual communication and design; and what they teach you is aesthetic; why whatever-it-is is aesthetic is sociological.

I don't mean to imply that the department tried to make itself appear more traditionally academic to win Faculty approval. The whole purpose of studying the visual environment is to recognize and create social impact. For example, almost all the projects in the still photography course study either the way people act, the way people have created things, or the way they interact with the things they have created. You are marked on how well you express your idea; so you are graded on an aesthetic. But other departments of the University grade you at least partly on how well you write what you have to say, which is as much of an aesthetic. The two, what you say and how you say it, overlap so much as to be indistinguishable most of the time anyway.

What the potential concentrator ought to remember is that while the importance of the study is sociological, he will be working on aesthetics in the studio. This is what Professor Sekler is talking about, I think, when he says the major is for people with "a special interest and commitment and the necessary capabilities. Candidates will definitely be screened."

The other factor that will keep the number of concentrators down is limited equipment and space. Over 200 applications for 24 places in courses like Vis Stud 140 have kept this course and others right up there with Robert Lowell's versification seminar as the toughest to get into in the University.

The structure of the basic program of courses is still a little bit up in the air as the new department gets ready to float its trial balloon next year. But as it now stands the course requirements go like this:

* Rudolph Arnheim's new course (V.S. 100 a,b), Introduction to a Psychology of Visual Studies: Perception and Expression in Art and Design. If his course is like his book, Art and Visual Perception, it will start with tension between two dots and go from there.

* Vis Stud (formerly Arch Sci) 125, Design in the Visual Environment. Like Arnheim's it will be a lecture course taught, in this case, by two architects (Donald Freeman and Eduard Sekler) who will probably emphasize form, structure, and materials in modern buildings and city planning.

* Three terms of studio work--divided into either two terms of graphic design (V. S. 20, 21) and one of Light and Communication (photography, animation, film, etc.); or two terms of Light and Communication (V.S. 40), and one of graphic design.

* Junior Tutorial.

* Thesis. Usually a project done under one of three different courses.

* A required related course chosen from Math 1, Stat 1c, Physics 1, Nat Sci's 2, 5, 7, and 115, Ec 1, Soc Rel 10 and Phil 2 or 140.

* Two and a half more courses in the department, one of which can be chosen from a huge list of optional related courses.

The concentration requirements are pretty good. There is a total of seven and a half required courses, including tutorials and an optional course that can be almost anything. Not counting tutorials, there are only one and a half courses that you have to take. The rest of the requirements are filled with options that let you concentrate at least three completely different ways without committing yourself to a special program.

The vac idea is that you learn how to look at things, how to create things, and how to interpret things in the visual environment. For example, last fall's final exam in arch sci (next year called vis stud) 125 was a slide show of material studied in the course and only some of which were pertinent to the test questions.

In most courses the student is on his own to create and then deduce what he may. In studio courses both upstairs at the Carpenter Center in graphic design and downstairs in Light and Communication involve themselves almost exclusively in work on projects with most student-instructor discussion concerning technique rather than theory.

GIVEN that most of the same people now teaching in the Carpenter Center will return next year in the new program to teach the same or similar courses, a few criticisms of present teaching will probably still be relevant next year. The remarks are often made of the department in general although they deserve application in one course or one field of teaching.

First, instructors are too concerned with the legitimacy of the department and the courses they teach. It was perhaps this sort of worrying about what the Faculty would think that confused freshmen. And attempts by teachers to go too far into sociology puts them where they are often weakest instead of most helpful. Their desire to seem academically legitimate in a society that defines intelligence in terms of the ability to use language sometimes makes an uneasy tension.

It also seems extraordinary that so many positions on the VAC Faculty are held by Europeans. If there is a compensating reason for this unusual balance (American design schools are not very good?) that reason isn't evident to the student. To him, it seems possible that importing instructors Europe might be another way of lending legitimacy to the department. But part of this might be due to the lingering influence of Walter Gropius, former dean of the Design School, and the Bauhaus school of thought.

Secondly, students sometimes see in each others' work media used for effect instead of for a purpose integral to the motive idea. For example, it was remarked of the recent showing of a student thesis called The Production that color slides and a strobe seemed to be worked in just because they could be used, and not because the show called for them.

Lastly, some see a cut-off in how far VAC courses let you go above a certain level of competence in a field. There is always the possibility of do- ing a special project for credit--the only way you can go above that level of competence. But these are difficult to get approved. And if there is a tendency to favor a certain kind of project, it is for those of mixed or experimental media. A simple painting project might be rejected because the Center wouldn't want to legitimize what outsiders might consider a craft.

But this last criticism is the most tenuous. And next year and the year after most of the new courses will be upper-level studies that should call for higher levels of competence.

Some of the best things that can be said of the program are that the members of the department, especially in Light and Communication, are quite interested in student work, the projects are personally meaningful to the students, and the atmosphere is experimental and flexible. Most important, Vis Stud offers not only a different subject to study, but a different way to study