Fortunately, Harvard has developed a tradition of individualized instruction through freshman seminars, tutorials, course sections, and senior theses. These elements of the curriculum are all strongly supported by faculty, alumni, and students alike. But almost all agree that further progress needs to be made. For example, in a survey several years ago, students, faculty and alumni came to remarkably similar conclusions when they were asked to rank in order of importance more than 30 possible reforms of the College.

In addressing these needs, we should look initially to the first two years of college. Freshmen and sophomores have too few opportunities for engaging in active intellectual work under direct faculty supervision. We provide enough freshman seminars to accommodate only 35 per cent of the class, although students have considered an expansion of these seminars to be one of the most important changes to be made in undergraduate education.

Sophomore tutorial is notably less successful than the junior and senior year counterparts and is not taught by faculty members to any appreciable extent. These deficiencies account, more than anything else, for the common complaint that "students are not really taught by the faculty." Since all studies suggest that colleges make their greatest intellectual impact in the earliest years, there is clearly a problem here that requires a solution.

We surely do not need to take the extreme position that every course be taught in a small group; the costs would be prohibitive, and there is no respectable body of research which suggests that such a reform would produce significant benefits.

What students deserve is an opportunity in each of their first two years to take some portion of their program in the form of seminars or small discussion courses, taught by professors and with frequent opportunities for written work and faculty critique. This goal could be achieved by expanding the number of freshman seminars, by developing additional core courses with small enrollments, or conceivable in other ways.

Although such a commitment would require heavy use of faculty resources, this hurdle should not be insurmountable. In a 1970 College survey, most members of the faculty indicated a preference for teaching undergraduate seminars and tutorials rather than lecture courses. Since graduate enrollments have declined, professors should have more time available to teach undergraduates in smaller settings. And in the largest departments, where faculty-student ratios seem too low to allow enough instruction of this type, we may simply have to enlarge the size of the faculty.

The above article is an excerpt from President Bok's annual report to the University, released last week.