BROWN'S undergraduate curriculum had last been revised during the 1944-45 school year, when the faculty decided to require students to take 12 semesters of courses for distribution (four each in humanities, sciences, and social sciences) and to show a "reasonable degree of mastery of some special field of intellectual interest." But unlike Harvard in 1949, Brown did not create any new "general education" courses to view specialized knowledge in a perspective broader than that of any one department.

Students at Brown filled out their programs with elective courses from established fields. There was a flurry of innovation in the '50's with the creation of "Identification and Criticism of Ideas" (IC) Courses and then of University Courses in 1958. The latter were upper-level integrative efforts, and four of them (like "Technology and the Moral Order" and "Conceptions of Man") still survive as part of the school's new curriculum. But the IC Courses-small-group interdisciplinary courses-were not part of the required curriculum, and with ered away.

By 1961, a meeting of the faculty's curriculum committee reported, "It is believed that our present curriculum is now nearing its terminal state . . . that revision of the rules is needed." But no one took the initiative to make those revisions.

"By the '60's," says senior Susan Friedman, who has now replaced Magaziner as Brown's most active reformer, "Brown had stagnated. The student body was passive." Nothing had replaced the defunct IC Courses. Many departments had established restrictive patterns, even specified sequences, of courses for concentrators. Ordinary concentrators usually needed eight courses, honors candidates ten. The distribution requirement was more onerous than ever (two semesters in each of seven general areas, plus another year of intermediate work in an area other than that of the student's concentration). Distribution requirements were still satisfied by taking large, introductory survey courses. All courses were for grades: there was no pass-fail option.

Nevertheless, some interesting ideas remained buried in the curriculum. One was the University Course. Another was inter-departmental concentration. Some of these fields (Applied Mathematics, and Molecular Biology) were not novel, at least by Harvard standards. But others were truly interdisciplinary, like Ancient Civilization or International Relations, and offered the possibility of release from the established concerns of traditional departments. A third idea was independent study, which was authorized for all students, including freshmen. Students who had "demonstrated ability to profit" from independent work could take two courses each term in this manner.

The independent study program provided the vehicle for reform at Brown.

By the end of his first year at Brown, Magaziner was disgusted by what he called freshman boredom, by the "narrow professionalism" of regular concentration requirements, by grade-grubbing, by the lack of contact with faculty members in large lecture courses, and by what he felt to be an incoherent undergraduate program.

"Undergraduate education," accord-ing to Robert Friedel, a junior who worked closely with Magaziner last year. "had become something that was 'done to' the student" according to a set of imposed rules, and not an experience "directed to the student's individual needs."

BUT that conclusion was reached only after long deliberation. In the fall of 1966, Magaziner was not sure why he and other students were dissatisfied. He proposed a research project to find out. Taking advantage of the independent study option. Magaziner helped form a group of Brown and Pembroke students, "whose only impetus was a vague dissatisfaction with their education . . . to discuss the role and purpose of a liberal arts college." Magaziner and his colleagues became Brown's first Group Independent Study Project (G.I.S.P.).

During the 1966-67 academic year, the group studied the history and development of American higher education, as well as (by their own count) more than 80 separate statements, by educators and philosophers, on what a liberal education should be. They couldn't find one they liked. They decided to write their own instead.

The group did not finish its work that spring, but the effort did not stop at the end of the term. Dean Eckelmann found $800 to support Magaziner during the summer of 1967 as he worked at rewriting and duplicating parts of what he modestly called "A Draft of a Working Paper for Education at Brown University."

That fall, Brown's new president. Ray L. Heffper, detailed a special subcommittee of the faculty's Curriculum Committee to begin considering reform of the undergraduate program while Magaziner and his co-workers gave final from to their year-long efforts.

Magaziner concluded that the focus of undergraduate education should be on the individual, helping him, as he later wrote, "to cope . . . with crucial human and social problems. "The University, therefore, should encourage both the search for "self-realization." and the "developing of intellect" It should remove, or at least minimize, "pressures which would defeat the seeking of self-knowledge": and it should oppose "narrow professional orientation."

"We worked on breaking down every requirement," Friedel recalled recently. "because requirements per se say that something is good for everybody. We assumed that each student is best qualified to decide what his education is going to be. When you tell people what is good for them, they learn how to beat the system, and they know how to beat it because they have been doing it for four years in high school."

Letter grading, the Report concluded, is a major part of that system, and the students recommended that it be ended.