"A lot depends entirely on the implementation process," Hoskins says, "The faculty needed a hard sell for a lot of our points and it is not my impressions they got one. We ended up selling it to colleagues who had not yet confronted the budget crisis, and the report seemed like bad news to them."

She says a series of student interview sessions that were not well attended seriously damaged the committee's work, and without students the committee lost an important lobby with the faculty. When the report was forgotten by the fall of 1972, students and faculty forgot it together, she says.

"Other schools now call us and ask us to please send us a copy of your wonderful report. But nobody from Yale asks us," Hoskins says.

Bold and radical change

shot down at Princeton

Princeton took a similar course. There in 1970 former president Robert F. Goheen established a Commission on the Future of the College with the general mandate to conduct a "major review of undergraduate education at Princeton." Goheen appointed Marvin Bressler, Professor of Sociology, to chair a 19-member committee of ten faculty members, six undergraduates and three administrators to deliver a "reappraisal of the entire undergraduate program in order that we may better anticipate and control the future."

Initially the Princeton report was greeted with an even more devastating response than the Dahl report at Yale. Delivering his own preliminary report in 1971, recommending radical changes in the structure of the college including a three-year B.A., Bressler was shot down by both student and faculty opposition before a vote could be taken. "It lost totally, there was no sentiment for it," Bressler says about the original report.

A discouraged Bressler then went back to committee and emerged two years later with a new 252-page report that some members of the committee call considerably diluted from Bressler's originally bold recommendations. Neal Rudenstine, in the dean's office at Princeton and a member of the Bressler commission now calls that final report a success because a number of its recommendations were implemented, including a proposal for equal access admissions. "The report also provided us with an extraordinary inventory and assessment-it was very worth-while," Rudenstine says.

Daniel Seltzer, a Harvard professor of English for 15 years before going to Princeton and a member of the commission, says the later report was a success. Seltzer mentions, however, that some key provisions - including important changes in the academic calender, language requirement, and core curriculum - were killed because "a lot of important professors on campus were against" Of the debate on core curriculum Seltzer says, "more lobbying with the faculty could have been done before this recommendation was promulgated," to achieve better results.

If the report was a failure in any sense, Adele Simmons '63, dean of students at Princeton, Harvard Overseer, and a committee member, says it was only a failure of expectations. Simmons said there was a prevalent belief on campus that the Bressler Commission would come up with the definitive answers to major questions about the concept of higher education in the next 20 years. The report couldn't fulfill that function, she says.

The biggest problem that these types of reports run into, Rudenstine says, is that they promise more than they can deliver. "It's not clear that many things can be shifted in undergraduate education," Rudenstine says about the lack of great change coming out of the Bressler report. "I don't think you can turn something upside down. If you have a lot of dollars or if you are currently doing a lousy job then there may be something to recommend" Otherwise nothing may come of the report.

"Given the constraints, nothing dramatic happened from the report," Bressler says. "Nothing big came out of it, and from that standpoint it was a failure. The report's most salutary effect was that it created a dialogue on the purposes and adequacies of the college."

Although the degree of success of the report may be debatable, not one of the committee members interviewed had any regrets about undertaking the study. Most considered the report valuable at least for discussion and inventory purposes. It is very important to stop everything once in a while and evaluate the college and assess it, Simmons says today. "It is difficult to come up with a better alternative within the reasonable economic framework."

It Can't Happen Here

Harvard's attempt at examining undergraduate education hasn't reached the level yet where the implications of the Yale and Princeton reports can be felt. In fact, the committees, each of which had copies of the Yale and Princeton reports, have just begun examining those reports themselves.