In this vein, Kiely's program appears to be a preventive against the pre-professional fever that infects freshmen who find no other order or purpose in their first year course other than getting on the track for medical or law school.

A second possible advantage of Kiely's proposal is that it might induce senior faculty members who are reluctant to prepare a full-stage Sanders Theatre performance or to commit a full fifth of their time to freshmen to become involved in the general education of first-year students. Besides that, team teaching would provide a forum for professors and graduate students in diverse fields to engage and cooperate with one another as well as with their students.

Perhaps the greatest danger of a program such as Kiely's is that it would evolve into another elite insituation-within-the-institution--a junior History and Literature or Social Studies. One safeguard would obviously be to make it available to everyone. Assuming that, at least at first, enrollment would be limited, a second safeguard would be to insure that admissions is not based on "academic preparedness." But ultimately the only sure safeguard would rest in the attitude adopted by the seminars' participants and the tone set by their originators. If they fall back on the familiar and myopic goal of grooming future academics, the best laid structural plans may go awry. A "great leap forward" would then become just another cautious step in the wrong direction.

Despite deep currents of dissatisfaction, educational reform has been an outstanding non-issue among undergraduates during the past year and over the four years of the Class of '74's life at Harvard. Undergraduates in general have confined themselves to private mutterings. And the vocal minority has tended to regard issues of departmental requirements and organization or the "quality" and "ethical content" of undergraduate courses as liberal distractions from the task of scrutinizing Harvard's involvement in activities outside university walls. With ample justification student activists have seen CUE's activities as involving little more than endless pettifogging over calendar reforms and other minor legislation.

Nonetheless student commitment and agitation have given rise to several of this past year's scattered but important educational innovations. Next year's courses on elementary and secondary education and teaching and on the bilingual community were both created by students in Phillips Brooks House. As part of an attempt to make their own programs more than a continuation of traditional Harvard charity, they pushed the two courses through Harvard's obstinate bureaucratic machinery. Student agitation also played a noteworthy role in assuring that a Marxist voice will continue to be heard in Harvard's Economics Department.

Now, the administration has projected a re-examination of undergraduate education that will glance beyond the random issues which have normally occupied the Faculty's docket since the late '40s. The specific innovations, reforms and proposals of the past few years contain the germs of valuable educational ideals and principles that need to be nurtured and fully articulated in order to influence the work of the second "Redbook committee." Without student efforts even these piecemeal advances might have faltered. But next year's student body must begin to explore the general values and principles which underlie their specific complaints. Failing this they will have little clout in hammering out the next 20 years' educational consensus.