Students at the Medical School this spring demonstrated the power of organized student resistance. Three-fourths of the third-year class signed statements in April declaring in effect they would not return to the school in the fall if the faculty stood by a requirement, new with the class, that students take a minimum number of courses in one of twelve fields of medicine.

The faculty did not rescind the requirement, as the students had wanted, but it did back off. The School's faculty council agreed to a compromise, proposing that students' faculty advisers be allowed to reduce the number of courses required of individual students in a field of concentration.

Expunged

Expungement, that dread punishment that entails erasing every trace of a student's presence at the College, is no longer a threat for Harvard undergraduates. The Faculty voted to rescind the regulation last fall after the general counsel's office advised them it was inconsistent with state laws regarding school records. Expungement as they say, was expunged.

Grad school problems

After months of discussion between the Faculty Council and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, administrators and students, Dean Rosovsky unveiled a plan this spring to reorganize minority recruiting and admission at the GSAS, a school which has traditionally had very low levels of minority enrollment.

The plan, similar to the program the minority students committee proposed back in December, broadened the minority financial aid program and set up a Faculty committee to continually review GSAS minority recruitment and admissions policy. The new committee will also execute the most controversial aspect of the reorganization plan: writing the job description and conducting the search for a new GSAS minority admissions administrator.

At term's end, Rosovsky had not yet selected members for the new committee, and a spokesman for the GSAS minority student group expressed doubt that a suitable person for the post could be hired by this September.

Accent grave

Ramamurthi Swaminathan, a native of India finishing a one-year economics program at the Kennedy School, was chosen to give the graduate student oration at Commencement, but then the committee changed its mind because it decided Swaminathan's accent was too thick for an American audience to understand. They don't understand Jimmy Carter's speeches, either.