The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS) is once again a hot topic at Harvard. While the College and the Core monopolized the Faculty's attention for over a decade, the grad school is now getting its share of the limelight. Five departments have changed their graduate programs in the past year, and the GSAS itself is receiving its first searching review in 15 years.

The most prominent step in the review, is the recently appointed Strauch Committee, chaired by Leverett Professor of Physics Karl Strauch, formed this summer in one of A. Michael Spence's first actions as Dean of the Faculty. The committee expected to spend the school year interviewing students, faculty, and administrators in an attempt to gauge the state of the GSAS.

But the Strauch Committee is only one of several efforts to re-define the GSAS. In the Government Department, for instance, curricular reforms enacted this summer were aimed at combatting over-specialization. And in University Hall Spence has chosen to reduce GSAS bureaucracy by not replacing Jeremy W. Rusk, who retired last spring as associate dean of he GSAS for administration.

Since the last full-scale review of the GSAS was conducted in 1969 by the Wolff Committee--who focused their attention on the size of the grad school--conditions have changed, professors and administrators say. Not only has the size of the GSAS been reduced since the reforms of the early 1970s, but even more importantly, the Wolff Committee's vision of the grad school's purpose and direction is non somewhat outdated. "The waters have been muddied in the last five-six years, and it's time now for someone to determine what the nature of the graduate school is," says C. John Friesman, assistant GSAS dean for academic planning and administration.

The Strauch Committee is expected to analyze the GSAS's role in the 1980s and 1990s, says Peter S. McKinney, Spence's acting dean of the grad school for the academic year. The major issues appear to be should the GSAS expand to meet the larger academic job market of the 1990s, and if so how much; should the GSAS prepare students solely for academic life; what structure of admissions, advising, and placement should be implemented; what balance should the GSAS draw between departmental autonomy and Byerly Hall centralization?

POWER STRUGGLE

It the last question that complicates the matter. The GSAS administration in Byerly Hall has expanded dramatically since the Wolff Committee report--to the dismay of some departments--and the issue of who actually runs the GSAS gets mixed up with the broader policy issues.

"Individual units at Harvard are autonomous, right down to the individual professors.... It's important to remind (the administrators) that the final word on graduate education rests with the departments," says Professor of Literature Joel Porte, former director of graduate studies in the English Department.

"The grad school is a funny animal, and some people suggest that there is no graduate school that what there is is 50 departmental programs," McKinney says. "There is built in to this situation a tension between the departments, which rightfully believe themselves to be the determinants of the programs, and the central administration, which has a reponsibility to keep watch over these 50-odd programs," McKinney adds.

The power struggle has been going on for the past decade, ever since former deans of the graduate school Edward T. Wilcox and Burton S. Dreben '49 implemented the current need based financial aid policy in the early 1970s. Using the centrally administered financial aid as a wedge, according to one account, the GSAS bureaucracy swelled under the seven-year deanship of Edward L. Keenan '57, who stepped aside in July.

Dismantle Me

But since the departure of Richard A. Kraus, Keenan's associate dean for administration, for the State Senate in January of 1983, "things have been cut back already," says Friesman. The offices of students affairs and special students have merged, as have admissions/financial aid and academic planning/administration Friesman says.

If professors hope that the Strauch Committee will further dismantle the obtrusive GSAS bureaucracy, they are likely to be disappointed McKinney predicts. The committee may recommend "exactly what we're doing now. I frankly think it's a certain outcome."

Strauch and Spencer were unavailable for comment this week.

CURRICULUM CHANGES