Many of them have gone into fields where there are relatively few undergraduates. "There is an appearance of more growth in the faculty than is real" in terms of resources for undergraduates, Dean Rosovsky explains. He mentions in his letter to the Faculty the fact that the number of departments and degreegranting committees has grown from 41 in 1944 to 54 in 1974. A comparison of catalogues from each of those years reveals that a major source of the kind of apparent growth Rosovsky talks about is in the addition of "labor-intensive" departments. An example is Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations which requires a large number of instructors to cover all the subdisciplines in the field--and which draws comparatively few students.

Another source of apparent growth is the number of endowed chairs in fields which are primarily of interest to graduate students.

The other places are the field and into the laboratory. Many trace the demise of teaching and the displacement of faculty instruction by graduate student teaching to the "Plush Sixties" when millions of dollars in government funds became available for basic research. Whether the preference for conducting research was motivated by need to establish grounds for tenure or desire to do work in one's own specialty, scholars were offered the resources to indulge themselves.

At the same time, new funds became available for teacher training and graduate fellowships, facilitating the increase in the GSAS during the 1960s to its high of 2827 in 1966-67. One of the supposed benefits of Harvard's graduate school is the opportunity it provides for students to teach. The influx of willing teaching fellows in the 1960s coincided with faculty members' desire to spend more time on research.

When government funds were sharply cut back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, requiring the GSAS to cut student enrollment, many faculty were simply "out of the habit" of conducting sections and tutorials, as Kiely points out.

"The use of graduate students for so many kinds of teaching was itself an exception to Harvard tradition," Kiely said. "If anything, the decrease in the GSAS's enrollment will force a good thing."

Other administrators echo this sentiment. Rosovsky claims that the decline in the number of graduate students will free faculty teaching resources, and defines the most basic problem facing the College as the redirection of these resources back to undergraduates.

Dean Whitlock recalls that in the 1950s students felt there was much more student-faculty contact than today, when the ratio is nearly twice as favorable. "If nothing changes, then we won't have enough teaching resources," Whitlock says, adding that what is needed is a "redistribution of workloads."

Rosovsky claims that "the number of students is not really related to the quality of education." He may be right, but it is expansion of that number which is forcing--at last--the issue of the quality of undergraduate education.

This is the second part of a series on Harvard's possible expansion.