"Also, look for Dean Knowles and the Faculty to design ways of offering small courses to freshmen in far greater numbers than our Freshman Seminar program is now able to do," Todd says.

The Changing Face of FAS

Though the majority of the Faculty denies that classes are too big at present, some say that class size has increased in recent years. More importantly, there is an almost unanimous agreement to shrink class sizes in the future.

Lewis denies that a drastic change in class size has occurred, simply because neither the size of the student body nor the size of the faculty has been dramatically altered.

"I don't have any sense that there has been any change on the average," Lewis says. "I would be surprised if there had. The size of the faculty and the number of students have both been about constant so the average class size can't have changed much.

Knowles says that in the coming years, the goal of the Faculty is to decrease the student-faculty ratio and improve relations between professors and students.

"Over the next decade, we want to increase the size of the faculty while keeping the college the same size," Knowles says.

Knowles and Rudenstine also say that it is the goal of the Faculty to ensure that preeminent professors continue to come to Harvard.