Core Curriculum reform became the year's hottest academic controversy as the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) debated and finally voted to approve changes to the Core.

Since 1974, when the Faculty replaced General Education with the Core, a system of undergraduate area requirements, FAS has made small adjustments to the program, adding new classes and changing regulations.

But the 18-month study by the Faculty's Core Review Committee (CRC), chaired by Pforzheimer University Professor Sidney H. Verba '53, marked the first attempt to reevaluate the Core's mission and future since the program's inception.

The CRC came down squarely in favor of the Core as originally conceived. In its report to the Faculty, Verba's committee--which consisted of two students and six professors--endorsed the Core's goal of exposing undergraduates to different approaches to knowledge.

Because the CRC felt the Core was educationally valuable to Harvard's undergraduates, the committee's report did not recommend drastic changes.

Instead, the report proposed adding a new Core subfield in Quantitative Reasoning (replacing a test out option), bringing the number of Core fields to 11 and raising the number of courses offered in each area.

To balance the new Quantitative Reasoning course students would now have to take, the CRC recommended reducing the number of overall Core requirements from the current eight to seven, a proposal the committee abandoned amid Faculty opposition.

The CRC's proposal sparked intense debate both in the FAS, the Faculty Council, a small group of professors elected by their colleagues to advise the Faculty and among the wider College community.

Some argued the proposal did not go far enough toward giving students more choice of courses and the opportunity to take departmental classes for Core credit.

Others warned that such a liberal approach would lead to a system of pure distribution requirements and the demise of the Core, a debate that intensified when Professor of English and Comparative Literature James Engell proposed adding courses not taught at an introductory level into the Core curriculum.

For the first time in recent memory, the Faculty voted against a Faculty Council recommendation to table the proposal, disregarding the unanimous advice of the council in a narrow vote before approving Engell's proposal by a slightly wider margin.

Surprisingly, the debate over Core reform did not engage most of the undergraduate community in formal discussion.

A CRC question-and-answer session aimed at addressing student concerns drew only a few undergraduates--most of whom were Undergraduate Council representatives. However, students later blamed the meeting's low turnout on lack of publicity.

The debate over Core reform came during a year when students were especially dissatisfied with the Core.

Many students were disappointed when several of the largest and most popular Core classes, including Historical Studies B-61: "The Warren Court" and Science B-29: "Human Behavioral Biology," were lotteried, forcing unlucky undergraduates to rearrange their schedules at the last minute.

In addition, only three courses were offered this year in the Moral Reasoning subfield, and the number of courses offered in the Core overall fell to a seven-year low.