The problems of curricular isolation and teacher morale that some see at Harvard are the same difficulties all universities with writing programs must face.

If Harvard's system is not always effective, as critics charge, perhaps the answers lies in other institutions' attempts to address those problems:

Stanford administers its writing requirement through the English Department, using a mixture of graduate students, professors and lecturers to teach it, says Joyce Penn Moser, associate director of the Program in Critical Thinking.

But the university uses a Writing Across the Curriculum program to tie all parts of the faculty to the teaching of writing.

The program introduces discipline-specific writing skills to reinforce the broader lessons of Stanford's first-year program, says Claudes M. Reichard, lecturer in English and training consultant in WAC. Eighteen departments and 40 courses are currently involved, he says.

Stanford professors who have taught WAC classes in their departments say the experience has been valuable both for undergraduates and for those who teach them.

Stephen Chiu, a Stanford professor of physics who has taught the department's writing-intensive course, says undergraduates in science need to learn how to write in their discipline before graduate school.

"Scientific writing is something that's very important," Chiu said. "Most of the time graduate students learn about writing when they are graduate students and writing papers."

And, says Stanford Associate Professor of Art Michael J. Merriman, teaching a writing-intensive class is "both instructive and eye-opening" for professors more used to expounding on a topic than teaching a skill.

At Princeton, students can take a writing-intensive seminar offered by a professor or a lecture course in a variety of different departments with specially trained graduate students offering writing-focused sections.

Also, the majority of students take writing classes from professors and graduate students working under a lecturers are hired as well, says Marvina White, who is acting director of the Princeton Writing Center.

The lecturers are a mix of academics and professional writers, she says, and they can be hired for up to six years at a salary about $5,000 higher than what Harvard offers its Expos teachers.

The advantage of the Princeton system, says White, is that it integrates itself into the rest of the faculty and curriculum. It is overseen by a Council for the Humanities made up of professors from a number of disciplines, and professors from all parts of the faculty teach under its auspices.

At Duke University, graduate students from a variety of different departments teach the writing classes required of all first-years.

More significantly, the school has an extensive training and mentoring program in place to add to collegiality and coherence, according to Professor of the Practice of Rhetoric George D. Gopin, director of writing programs.