The Teaching Fellow training regulations approved Wednesday by the Faculty Council are a compromise between competing interests.

On one side, undergraduates want a guarantee that their tuition money will buy them uniformly good teaching.

On the other, professors defend the autonomy of individual faculty members and departments, which have traditionally seen little interference from Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) administrators.

And in the middle are the TFs themselves, who fear that departments will use regulations to attack section leaders.

The plan adopted this week seems closest to the faculty ideal: the power to determine TF training regulations is still in the hands of individual departments, though Dean for Undergraduate Education Lawrence Buell must approve their designs.

Two alternative proposals offered by Buell and the Undergraduate Council, respectively, would have subjected all teaching fellows to a uniform standard.

Buell two weeks ago proposed a language test for all TFs, and the Undergraduate Council in December suggested common evaluation guidelines for all section leaders.

Buell's original plan was altered, and the Undergraduate Council's guidelines haven't made it to the Faculty Council.

Faculty Council members defend the new plan and the autonomy it grants individual departments.

They objected to Buell's original draft because is violated that autonomy. Faculty also feared that certain departments which rely heavily on foreign TFs would lose qualified members of their teaching staff based on arbitrary and impersonal assessments.

"The previous proposal was considered to have two defects," Buell said this week. "One was that it was too narrowly focused on the language issue, and the other was that it was too rigid in developing a central plan for dealing with [the training].

The new guidelines give departments the initiative while still forcing a renewed commitment to the training of teachers, professors say.

"This allows each department to have flexibility to do what they think is necessary and important," Baird professor of Science Gary J. Feldman, a Faculty Council member, said this week.

Departments are fully capable of taking care of their own problems, professors say.

Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics Howard Georgi, who is the chair of the Physics department, says his department recognized its own difficulties and dealt with them long before the new plan appeared.