Officials with interest in and responsibility for the curriculum have long recognized that writing is undervalued at the College.

"I'd like to see more interaction between departments and Expos," Dean for Undergraduate Education Lawrence Buell said in an interview last fall. "The departmental programs, particularly tutorial instruction, could benefit from the systematic instruction in writing that the Expos people have."

Many professors have similar feelings. "I'd be very interested in seeing proposals to see more formal and articulated links between what goes on in Expos and others courses," Professor of Biology Andrew H. Knoll said last year.

Sommers' task is to somehow push the bureaucrats and the professors to do something about the problem. That will be difficult. The faculty committee best situated to help writing spread through the curriculum--the Standing Faculty Committee on Expository Writing--meets sparingly and is notoriously ineffectual.

"I think the objectives of committees like these are not to be a second sort of evaluation process but to think about goals and objectives," said Susan W. Lewis, director of the program and a member of the standing committee, in describing the committee's role last year. "I think it would be hard for a committee... to do anything implementational."

Making change is complicated by the attitudes many professors hold about writing. Howard M. Georgi III '68, chair of the physics department, last year explained the learning process for writing: "Someday you write a paper with someone who knows how to write and they beat on you until you know how to do it."

Expos teachers also feel that for Sommers to succeed, she must make it easier for them to communicate with the faculty. Under the Marius administration, many teachers in the program complained the Expos administration isolated writing instructors from the rest of campus.

Sommers says she recognizes that changing the way Harvard professors and administrators think about writing will be difficult, and that converts must be won one by one.

Working with professors like Koerner, a dedicated writer, is easy, Sommers says. She consulted with him last year on writing assignments for Literature and Arts B-42 "The Altarpiece," and met with TFs in the course.

"In one class, Koerner gave a spectacular lecture about how he'd write about an altar-piece," Sommers recalls. "Instead of just, say, writing about an altarpiece, you could write about a detail in an altarpiece and then you could go from a part to a whole."

'Active Interpreters'

While she can be shy, Sommers is an aggressive personality, Expos teachers say. She says she wants first-years to learn to be "active interpreters," not "passive reporters" in their writing.

She is making small but meaningful changes to the Expos schedule in order to give first-years a better opportunity to do that.

Before this year, Expos required four 8-10 page papers, and both teachers and students complained that was too much work for a short Harvard semester. For the Class of 1998, the first paper will be 3-5 pages, the second and third 5-7, and only the fourth 8-10 pages in length.

"One of the analyses we did of Harvard assignments showed that a lot of times students were only asked to write three to five page papers," Sommers says. "So we wanted to give them that experience in Expos."