The house system created by President Abbott Lawrence Lowell was intended to allow students to mix academics with extracurricular life, in imitation of the residential college system of Oxford and Cambridge Universities.

The committee's paper, which Prabhu says has "generated a lot of talk on the CUE," aims primarily at drawing faculty into the houses more often. Suggestions include adding more house seminars and house-based sections and implementing house lecture series.

The paper also makes some recommendations which may be less realistic economically. These include using senior faculty as resident tutors, providing in-house office space for members of the senior common rooms and even constructing more physical classroom space in the houses.

Assistant Dean for Undergraduate Education Jeffrey Wolcowitz, who chairs the CUE, says he is convinced of the importance of these measures, but he cautions against undue optimism.

"It's cheap to make the recommendation, it's a lot harder to do these things," he says.

Budget constraints are not the only obstacle to increasing faculty presence in the houses. According to Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education David Pilbeam, current trends in academia might preclude the level of faculty presence that was feasible in the past.

"The pattern of academic life is different from what it was a few years ago," he says, explaining that today fewer faculty live near the houses--or even in Cambridge--than in the past. Professors are thus less likely to want to go to a house for meals during a busy day, Pilbeam says.

Pilbeam says that though the recommendations made by the council's academic committee "seem possible, and to some extent do-able," there are limits to what can be accomplished in concrete terms.

For example, he says he doubts the feasibility of constructing new classrooms in the houses, since any available funds would be used first to refurbish and upgrade existing spaces.

Faced with such social and economic realities, some faculty members believe changes in departmental policies might be the most realistic way to create more of a faculty presence in the houses.

Professor of Science William H. Bossert '59, master of Lowell House, says that current teaching requirements in many departments discourage senior faculty from giving house seminars.

"The people in the senior common room already teach too much at their departments," he says.

According to Bossert, many departments do not offer professors credit for teaching small house seminars. Thus house seminars are often extra, non-credit work which professors must do in addition to teaching departmental courses, Core classes and graduate seminars.

The result is a house seminar program that has "pretty much disappeared," Bossert says. He cites the 1991-92 course catalog, which lists only six house seminars for the year.

When the house seminar program was created in the 1970s, the 13 undergraduate houses were supposed to offer three to six seminars each, says David L. Duncan '93, a member of the Committee on House Life.