"It is too many years now after the birth of the program for it not to have reached an acceptable steady-state size," Lewis wrote. "I am not sure what the right incentive or other accommodation would be to increase the number, but I agree that the dearth of Core courses is a very serious issue for students."

The Core will be expanding next year through the new Quantitative Reasoning (QR) core, required of all members of the class of 2003. Knowles wrote that seven "seductive" courses in the new area have already been approved--in topics like algorithms and data structures, demography and number theory.

Along with funding for Faculty positions, the library system is one of the few areas still short of its Campaign fund-raising goals. However, Knowles said massive renovations to Widener Library--including a new heating and cooling system--are needed to preserve the library's collections.

"The odor of Widener's deeper recesses, while providing olfactory nostalgia to generations of readers, is actually the smell of decaying books," Knowles wrote.

On another development issue, however, Knowles said that Campaign funding did not mean that the Faculty would build to accommodate every call for more classroom space. He instead called on the departments to use existing space more efficiently.

"While I appreciate the desire of individual departments and units to have 'first call' on classrooms and teaching rooms that are nearby, I remain reluctant to devote new resources to building more classrooms until I am convinced that we are making the best use of those that we have," he wrote.

--Tara L. Colon contributed to the reporting of this story.