At some academic institutions, talk of raising the number of courses required to graduate would send Faculty into a frenzy to beef up the courses catalog.

However, at Harvard, preliminary discussion of changing the number of required courses from 32 to 34 or 36 hasn't sent those counting classes in the one-and-a-half pound Courses of Instruction scrambling; there are already plenty of general course offerings.

Harvard, a place saturated with tradition, prides itself on regular patterns and using what works. The 155-page course catalog from 50 years ago uses the same divisions in types of classes and professor limits that the 787-page course catalog today uses. The mathematics sequence of 1a, 1b, 21a and 21b that appears in the 1966-67 catalog is still followed by today's premeds.

And while Registrars have scrambled to keep up with an ever-expanding course list, the wide variety of classes available is one of the benchmarks of the world-class education Harvard offers.

Clear patterns are set in the Courses of Instruction: historically large social science departments like government, economics and history have often topped 75 classes offered per year.

At the other end of the scale, the Department of Celtic Languages and Literature has been consistently diminutive, never offering more than 20 classes in a year.

Professor of Law Derek C. Bok, who served as president of the University from 1970 to 1991, says the growth of classes is closely tied to the growth of the Faculty.

"The number of Faculty hasn't grown and Faculty teaching loads have gradually drifted downward," Bok says, hypothesizing that the larger increase in the number of classes Harvard saw in the late '60s and early '70s was due to the growing number of Faculty members.

"Faculty size has the greatest impact on the breadth and number of courses that can be offered," says Michael S. Flier, the chair of the Department of Linguistics.

According to Dean of the College Harry R. Lewis '68, the Capital Campaign dollars for new professorships will be targeted at those departments in need of more teaching staff.

Bok says the greatest increase in courses he remembers came with the introduction of the Core. (See story, page B-1.)

"You can see the difference with a major curricular change, however," Bok says. "With the [introduction of the] Core we had to come up with over 100 modified or new courses...so there was some net increase."

Though departments have stayed relatively steady in their offerings over the decades, the number of departments has changed. The Environmental Science and Public Policy and Womens Studies concentrations are new within the last decade, and Computer Science and Visual and Environmental Studies have also emerged within the past 50 years. (See story, page B-10.)

Meanwhile, the departments of Social Relations and Semitic Language and History, present in the 1946-47 catalog, have become the Sociology and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, respectively. The Department of Geology and Geography, which had 34 classes in 1946-47, has been assimilated into a number of departments.

Cataloging Change