Like many students, Eckelmann worries about the response of graduate schools to what Brown has done. He says he is confident, however, that these schools will soon be putting greater emphasis on letters of recommendation and on the results of the Graduate Record and other standardized admissions examinations.

"Ten or twenty grades don't tell you more about a student than three or four written evaluations," he said last week. "The professional schools will find out which schools have devised appropriate mechanisms for evaluating their students; and if we can carry it off, we will have more meaningful evaluation at Brown than ever before."

Can Harvard, as it plans to revise its undergraduate curriculum, learn from Brown's experience?

Obviously, some parts of Brown's "reformed" curriculum are already established practice here.

This year, Harvard is offering 46 freshman seminars, which aim at giving students the advantage of close contact with Faculty members, and 37 lower-level General Education which, to a greater or lesser degree, try to acquaint students with the basic concepts and the nature of the intellectual problems of the humanities and the natural and social sciences.

It offers some interdisciplinary study in some upper-level Gen. Ed. courses, and the number of these has been increasing steadily in recent years. It offers some interdisciplinary concen-trations- Social Studies, for example. It could offer more.

There are already almost as many students, proportionally, doing independent study at Harvard as there are now at Brown- 409 this semester. It is even possible, Archie C. Epps, assistant dean of the College, said last week, for a group of students to work together on a project for credit; and last year some students in Adams House organized the equivalent of a G.I.S.P. on "The Film." But most students are not aware of the possibility of group independent study.

But Brown also answered for itself two fundamental questions which will need to be answered at Harvard before the process of curriculum reform is complete.

The first, and most important of these questions, was about the purposes of undergraduate education. "Education for the undergraduate," Brown's Faculty decided, should foster both "the intellectual and personal growth of the individual student." To cap the student's intellectual growth, Brown retained the concentration requirement. To encourage the student's "personal growth," Brown gave him the widest latitude in choosing the nature of his work, and acknowledged, as one faculty member wrote, "what has long been true in fact: that it is the student who must finally make something of the educational experience the university offers." For both reasons, it decided to do away with conventional letter-grading and to try to get students and faculty together in small group more frequently.

BROWN considered, and rejected the notion that the University should impose, by means of a "core curriculum" or a combination of required courses, any single idea of what a liberally educated person should "know." It also rejected the notion that the undergraduate should have no focus to his studies at all.

Can a college abolish the conventional restraints of required courses and letter-grades, while still requiring that a student focus his academic efforts? How much responsibility for both "intellectual" and "personal" growth can it leave to the students themselves? Brown has answered these questions; Harvard has not yet faced the problem.

The second fundamental question Brown answered was about the process of educational reform itself. "We were fortunate." Brown's dean said last week. "in having some brilliant undergraduates who did an awful lot." Students opened the debate about curriculum reform, and followed through both with painstaking research and with intelligent argument in committee meetings and in professors' offices, and- when necessary- outside them at demonstrations on the College Green.

Eckelmann could have said as well that Brown was fortunate in having administrators who accepted student initiatives as legitimate and who took students' concerns seriously. Almost from the start. Brown's administration helped students push reform through an often disinterested and sometimes suspicious faculty.

"We achieved radical ends," Susie Friedman says, "but we did it through orderly and established processes. A lot of this was due to the tradition established by Ira- that you could get things done if you did your homework."

Magaziner wouldn't allow himself all the credit, though. "I've sat down with a number of administrators here," he said last spring, "for hours and hours, where we started off at completely opposite ends, and, after enough talking, we could in most cases come to agreement. It was because they listened."