Every Thursday at 9 a.m. during the fall semester last year, Diana I. Williams '95 filed into a tiny, overheated seminar room in William James Hall for her Foreign Cultures 46 section.

Williams estimates that there were 18 students packed into the room, and there were not enough chairs for all of them. Some were forced to stand or lean on window sills for the entire hour.

In that atmosphere, students learned little about the sociology of Caribbean nations, the class's topic.

"There was not a lot of discussion," she says.

If Williams' section had been what Dean for Undergraduate Education Lawrence Buell calls the "optimal" size of 12 to 16, students might have had--at the very least--a place to sit.

Good sections, in Buell's words, are "really indispensable to the attainment of good learning."

But interviews with more than 75 students, 80 teaching fellows and 40 Professors and administrators reveal that useless sections like Williams' are common in Harvard's vaunted core curriculum.

And the University has been unwilling to spend the money necessary to get smaller sections in which discussion might be more productive.

"Everyone would love [sections] to be smaller, but the cost would rise dramatically," says Director of the Core Program Susan W. Lewis.

In fact, a two-month Crimson investigation found that many undergraduates are alienated by the core's entire structure, which limits student choice and result in overcrowded sections and lectures.

Because of these problems, the core is failing in its mission. The program is supposed to be the key educational "beginning point" that draws students into new disciplines, Buell says, but undergraduates say that many core courses actually turn them off to learning.

"I do not think anyone come out of a [core] course thinking I really want to study more of that," says Ali Partovi '94. "They are not motivating."

Too Large

In a Crimson poll of 341 undergraduates, more than 70 percent said that the 20-person maximum for undergraduates sections is too large.

And students and TFs say that in the core, sections often break that limit.