Rosovsky has already started to tackle certain key questions regarding the focus of their reports. His decision to develop broad recommendations instead of the originally expected nuts-and-bolts suggestions has brought the task forces' reports into the same arena that submerged the Yale and Princeton reports. Most of the task force chairmen said last week that the majority of their recommendations will fall in the nut-and-bolts category - small, mostly administrative recommendations - that may not have to come before the Faculty. But James Q. Wilson, Shattuck Professor of Government and the chairman of the core curriculum task force, possibly the key group, said he expects his committee's work to have a broader, more philosophical mandate than the other task forces. "We won't have any necessarily more cosmic recommendations than others," Wilson insists. "But there is hardly a major proposal that would not have to be passed by the Faculty."

And it is at the faculty level that the principle lesson of the Yale and Princeton reports can be learned. Although Bressler himself was possibly the worst victim of faculty reaction against his first report, he cautions against bending a committee towards what the faculty may favor. "I don't think you ought to pre-judge" what the sentiment of the faculty is, he says.

Rudenstine, after his work with the Bressler committee, says that other committees like it need both nut-and-bolts and broad recommendations. Without a wide focus, he says, the committees become just inventory-takers, which isn't enough. Their role should be one of planning and providing for changes that would otherwise be implemented on a slower, more haphazard basis, he says.

Yale's Kessen acknowledges that the Harvard report faces the chance of being voted down, like it Yale counterpart, because of the unpredictable and usually conservative nature of the faculty. But he warns against worrying about the now, because "You start weakening your report when you start thinking about it. Can't be constrained by what the faculty will do. Speak to the needs of the College, and don't say platitudinous things."

Dahl is perhaps the most pessimistic about the outcome of reviews of undergraduate education. "In times of crisis," he warns, the crisis "may carry the program away. You may get turned into something as a consequence of the immediate. To some extent we were victims of crisis, which at the time turned out to be financial crisis, which deflected attention of the faculty away from long-term proposals."

Dahl says that a report on undergraduate education need a mix of philosophical elements and more procedural ones, but that in the end a faculty is moved by concrete, substantive recommendation. As for Rosovsky's task force scheme, Dahl says he sees advantages and disadvantages in it. On one hand, with seven task forces each topic will be taken up with a great deal of care - but at the same time there may be a "lack of a general overview of what the college could be doing" that stems from the study's diffusion.

"Basic structural or substantive changes are always difficult," Dahl warns, and because university faculties are by nature conservative, recommendations for broad change are usually doomed to failure. In the long run, a report here that is similar to the Yale committee's will probably lead to disappointment for its authors, Dahl says - a disappointment that is natural when you put in several years' work on a broad educational review that ends of gathering dust instead of momentum for change.