A common complaint heard in house dining halls, library carrels and expert evaluations of Harvard concerns the virtual absence of contact between faculty and students, often a result of large, impersonal lecture courses.

But Assistant Professor of Neurology Shahram Khoshbin points to the Currier House seminar he taught last year. Not only does he boast that he taught the class to a small group of students, but among them was Baird Professor of Science Dudley R. Herschbach, who even attended class the night after he won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry.

To Khoshbin, who taught Currier 127, "Disorders of the Brain and Behavior," the seminars exemplify one of the few ways the house system fulfills its original intellectual mission. Meeting with tutors in the communal environment of a residential house "increases the collegiate aspect of the course," he says.

"Psychologically, students don't have the feeling that they're doing hard work in the University," says Till M. Roenneberg, a research associate in biology who co-teaches North 119, "Chronobiology: Cells, Organisms, and Temporal Organization," with North House Master J. Woodland Hastings. "If the courses were held in the lecture halls of the bio labs, people would tend to say it's over at half past seven or eight. It's more of an open-ended discussion."

Because the seminars meet in the houses, Roenneberg adds, they can be structured very differently from other courses. A guest speaker would talk for the first half of his weekly class, and then the group would break for dinner in the house before resuming the discussion. This structure, he says, created a much more relaxed and productive atmosphere than the typical Harvard course.

"It's a comfortable atmosphere to work in, as opposed to a lecture or a section," agreed Jean E. Fox Tree '88, a student in Khoshbin's seminar last fall.

The vast majority of house seminar students call their experiences unique and valuable.

"It's a new experience, and I really think that everyone should take at least one house seminar," says Jonathan B. Jarashow, one of the few non-seniors who took a house seminar this year.

"It's probably had a greater effect on me than any other course I've taken," says Daphne M. Bein '88, who took Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry Armand M. Nicholi Jr.'s seminar Leverett 104, "Sigmund Freud and His Weltanschauung" last fall.

Despite rave reviews like these, not every house offers seminars. Only seven of the 13 houses--Cabot, Currier, Dudley, Dunster, Leverett, North and Winthrop--sponsored seminars this year.

"A few years ago, apparently they had a few seminars that were rather esoteric, which gave the program a bad name," says Khoshbin.

Legend has it, Herschbach adds, that Kirkland once offered a seminar on football--for credit. "You have to understand, I'm not vouching for it," he says.

Before a seminar is approved by Harvard, it has to receive the approval of a house committee on instruction. As a result, says Susan W. Lewis, who directs the seminar program, the seminars are often exceptionaly well-structured.

"They don't ask if this is something a department should offer," says Hastings, who is professor of biology. "They ask if this is something that is valid to teach."

The seminars, which are taught by members of the houses' Senior Common Rooms, officially are part of the General Education Department, the Core Curriculum's predecessor, which offers courses that do not fit into the guidelines of any one department.