The core is beginning to take shape.

That was the word this week from Faculty members and students on the Committee on Undergraduate Education (CUE), who began hinting at the from the proposed core curriculum will take when the Faculty finally gets a chance to vote on it.

The draft proposal, which the Faculty Council began debating this week, retains the same five basic areas that the Faculty decided on last spring: Letters and Arts, History, Social and Philosophical Analysis, Mathematics and Science, and Foreign Languages and Culture.

The proposal, which has not yet been released to the press or to the full Faculty, would apparently require each student to take a total of eight Gen Ed courses, although it provides for exemptions from certain areas.

Students who managed to sneak through high school with a thorough knowledge of their times tables, but not much more, will be disappointed if one key proposal passes. In what one CUE member said was a move to satisfy the University's "science people," the draft plan calls for each student to demonstrate a minimum degree of competence in mathematics.

The plan would apparently leave the current foreign language requirement intact, but the fate of the Expository writing program is still unknown.

Luckily for the mathematically--or otherwise--illiterate, the core is still a long way from being completely fleshed out. Sources close to the Faculty's deliberations indicate that the first students to feel the full weight of the core's requirements will be the members of the Class of '83.