This is the final installment in a series of features on issues that face Harvard this spring.

February 11, 1974--It was a strange setting for a major policy declaration. Sitting beneath the ornate crystal chandeliers supposedly expropriated from Eliot House by former Harvard President Abbott Lawrence Lowell (1877), savoring steak and red wine at tables uncustomarily covered with white linen, several hundred Lowell House residents strained to hear the extemporaneous remarks of the fledgling dean of the Faculty, Henry Rosovsky.

Although his audience probably expected the blather that educators prefer to hide behind, Rosovsky instead proceeded to announce a move that stands today as one of the most prominent decisions of his two - and - one - half-year tenure: "I think that Harvard College needs a new Redbook. It is time to reestablish a consensus that will last another 20 years." The comment by the Japanese - economics - professor - turned - dean, stated in a level, dispassionate voice, meant little or nothing to students gathered in the lofty dining hall. But it set off a wholesale review of undergraduate education that is just now, two years after Rosovsky's Lowell House remarks, beginning to emerge into concrete proposals.

More than three decades earlier President James B. Conant '14 had set out a similar goal, naming a dozen Harvard and Radcliffe Faculty members and administrators to a panel pretentiously called the "University Committee on the Objectives of a General Education in a Free Society." The committee's 1945 report greatly influenced the course of college education in the United States, outlining proposals for general education courses and requirements as they exist at Harvard and many other colleges today. The report's basic premise holds that there is a core of knowledge essential to a citizen in a free society and that it is the function of general education to provide that core.

But the report--known at Harvard as the "Redbook," after the color of its binding--has turned brown with age. Various Faculty and administration moves have chipped away at the educational temple that was erected along the lines of the Redbook's blueprint, and as President Bok admitted on the night Rosovsky made his announcement undergraduate education at Harvard no longer has "a very clear focus or set of objectives."

In his first move to generate discussion, Rosovsky presented the Faculty in October 1974 a 22 - page letter on the present state of undergraduate education. Perhaps mindful of tradition, Rosovsky also labeled the document by the color of its binding, but with a practical twist, dubbing it "The Yellow Pages." The letter, which outlines principal flaws and hints at possible revisions in undergraduate education, also declares Rosovsky's intention to establish "one or more faculty committees that will share with me the task of seeking broadly satisfactory answers" to questions the dean raised in the letter.

That intention was realized late last spring, when seven committees were finally set up, each consisting of six Faculty members, two students and one administrator, each mandated to explore a specific aspect of Harvard's undergraduate education.

But Rosovsky's comments in the Yellow Pages honed in on such specific problems that the letter left considerable confusion over his goal: Was it a Redbook Redux or merely a compendium of detailed and thus ephemeral and short - term revisions? Rosovsky himself acknowledges that he has switched intentions: "There is no contradiction, I've just changed my mind. I began with a notion that there were lots of things we could clearly do better that if we fixed up six to eight quite obvious problems it would justify the effort. I have come to realize more is needed." Rosovsky now says Harvard "needs an overall vision of undergraduate education." He declines to use the word philosophy. "It's so pretentious," he explains.

Although Rosovsky fathered the current educational review, he has until recently remained in the shadows, giving the task forces what he calls "an opportunity to thrash around." But in the last few weeks Rosovsky has assumed the role of the country doctor, making rounds for both social and remedial purposes. "I ask what the task forces are doing and suggest things they might do, I try really to act as a friendly critic," he says. Rosovsky, in regard to the health of the task forces, says he has diagnosed "relatively good progress." Still, a review of the seven ad hoc bodies indicates that while some are moving steadily toward making recommendations, otheres have faltered seriously. Reports on each of the task forces follow:

Core Curriculum

"To determine what common intellectual experience should be required of all students and what particular skills should be expected of all students."

Of all the seven task forces "The Yellow Pages" set in motion, the core curriculum panel faces perhaps the most challenging assignment. It must, in effect, pass judgment on the Redbook itself and come to some conclusion as to the general education foundation erected here after 1945.

Chairman James Q. Wilson, Shattuck Professor of Government, cautions against second - guessing the task force's intentions: It remains "far from clear," he says, "whether the panel will endorse maintenance of some core. Core curriculum is in our name, but with a question mark," Wilson said, shaping a question mark in the air with his finger, as he talked to a reporter last week.

An aura of mystery surrounds the deliberations of the committee. Wilson and other members refuse to discuss its progress. And, according to a member of another task force, the core curriculum group has virtually sequestered itself like a jury to avoid upsetting a fragile equilibrium-- at the outset, its members were split between abolishing gen ed and distribution requirements and expanding them. The task force has refused a request for a joint meeting from the concentrations committee, but Wilson says the rejection was not the result of a fear of tipping any balance. Instead, he says, "it is pointless to have a joint meeting when the purpose of such a meeting could not be served, because the task force has not decided what to do."

Wilson says he has been struck at the panel's bi-weekly meetings by the members' willingness to "take a fresh look" at the value of a core curriculum. While all the members of his panel are mindful of the Redbook, which is mandatory reading, they "do not feel bound by it or bound to challenge it," Wilson says. Yet such openmindedness creates tactical problems, Wilson adds; the task force must also pay attention to the politics of feasibility. It has to, he says, perform the "perplexing tightrope act of balancing daring proposals against possible restraints on their implementation--the greatest of those restraints being the Faculty.