"A large amount of coursework is being done in courses of enormous size," says Mark A. Peterson, head tutor of the Government Department. "The junior seminar is the one time when we can guarantee every student a small discussion seminar with a faculty member including senior faculty members."

But while its junior seminars have been lauded, Government is facing a crunch caused by a 45 percent increase in concentrators over the past three years and difficulties in finding new faculty, Peterson said.

While the department currently runs no more than 34 junior seminars a year, Peterson says that ideally, the total number for next year should be 44.

"We hope to have 36 or 37 junior seminars and as many tutorials as get approved next year," says Peterson. "That's not as many as we're going to need, but that's about as much as we can squeeze out of the faculty. For the juniors we need to have ideally, 44 seminars."

But department members say they will continue to offer junior seminars despite increasing demands on faculty, who will be forced to teach more students.

"Probably the average number of people in the seminars will go up and the percentage who get into their first choice [of seminar] will go down," Peterson says. Peterson added that if the government faculty did teach 44 junior seminars, they would be able to teach far fewer undergraduate courses.

In response to the current shortage of senior thesis advisors, the Government Department recently created a grade point restriction for honors candidiates wishing to write a senior thesis. Now, students who have less than an 11.5 departmental grade point average will have to petition to write a thesis.

Teaching in the Core

Exacerbating the shortage of faculty for tutorials in such large departments as History and Government are the demands imposed on faculty by the Core Curriculum.

As more and more students fulfill concentration requirements by less rigorous, large Core classes, it becomes more important to keep tutorials well taught and challenging, Ozment says.

"Some faculty are concerned that if your department's involved in the Core, it hurts your concentration curriculum," Ozment says. By teaching less rigorous Core classes, "some of the muscle of the department is being atrophied."

"It is important that the tutorials be very rigorous. The Core has been such a sacred cow that we have really not been asking...what the impact of the Core has been on course offerings," Ozment says.

Ultimately, faculty members say, the only way to increase faculty involvement in tutorial teaching College-wide is to enlarge the faculty in all departments. Faculty members say they hope that the results of the extensive curriculum review will make a strong case for an expansion of the Faculty that Spence has lobbied for from the start of his tenure as dean of FAS.

Peterson says that Harvard will have to contend with the national drought of young academics if it decides to expand the Faculty.

"The problem is a long time-lag in grad schools," Peterson says "Four to ten years ago, the market was terrible, and graduate schools were unpopular. Now it's hard to get junior faculty."