When Dean of the Faculty A. Michael Spence makes his fundraising pitch to alumni, there's one thing he's sure to mention--the need to increase the size of the faculty.

Spence, who has spent the bulk of his five-and-a-half year tenure as dean on issues of faculty staffing, is quietly preparing to revamp the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS). And he says he's convinced that increasing the number of senior faculty and bolstering the chances that junior faculty will receive tenure here are the keys to his plans for the venerable FAS.

To that end, the economist-turned-dean has launched what participants are calling "a curriculum review with a little `c' and a little `r'." The curriculum review, headed by Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education David Pilbeam, is designed to analyze the nuts and bolts of undergraduate education in each of the 42 concentrations, from tutorials to advising to course requirements.

"Virtually every question you could imagine about the structure of the curriculum and the way it is staffed and all the decisions that surround it are going to be affected in one way or another by this," says Spence.

It is a rare occurence when Harvard decides to review its undergraduate education: only twice in the last 50 years has the University undertaken such reviews, and the results--General Education and, later, the Core Curriculum--have had wide-ranging impacts in academia.

But while Pilbeam and the other four administrators on the committee insist that they are merely gathering information in hopes of bolstering the case for an increased faculty, they do say that a decision will be made in the next year about whether to launch a major curriculum overhaul.

Says Pilbeam, "This has a very serious educational component."

And for now, the most important component of the review is the role that it will play in helping sift through the myriad requests for new funds likely to become available from the impending University-wide capital campaign--expected to aim for up to $2 billion.

"We should not be trying to raise new resources before we have an understanding of how current resources are being used," says Jeffrey Wolcowitz, assistant dean for undergraduate education and a member of the curriculum panel.

Despite the possible long-term impact of the review, participants describe it as a low-key process intended simply to give administrators a better understanding of how the teaching of undergraduates is played out on a day-to-day basis.

"It's not a review that's necessarily designed to change anything or with any policy implications," says Wolcowitz.

The current review is typical of Spence's approach to guiding the 800-plus member faculty. It represents an exhaustive effort to gather information about the use of resources before making any decisions.

It is a strategy which has led some to question whether anything is being done under the Spence administration. But the dean argues that he entered office in 1984 with a dearth of information about the Faculty's financial standing and how it operates. The curriculum review is just one of his efforts to educate himself about his job, administrators say.

This has not been an easy task, administrators say, since FAS's fiercely independent departments and academic programs do not lend themselves easily to comprehensive study. "This is such an enormously diverse and autonomous place that there's very little standardization across the board," says Pilbeam.

FAS's decentralized structure has made the review process a time-consuming undertaking. In fact, one of the main reasons for conducting such a review in the first place is the lack of basic information about how departments structure the education of their concentrators.