Since it jumped from 15 students to 35 two years ago, Computer Science head tutor Steven J. Gortler's graphics seminar "just isn't the same."

As the number of CS concentrators nearly doubled between 1994 and the present, Gortler says his Computer Science 276r: "Computer Graphics, Special Topics," has become a "seminar" in name only.

"When you get to 35 people, it's hard to figure out how to maintain that interaction [in a small seminar]," Gortler said. "Students are missing out...they're thinking less on their feet."

The solution to Gortler's dilemma would seem to be getting another faculty member to teach a second seminar, but in a department with only 12 full-time professors, help is nowhere to be found.

Two years after Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) Jeremy R. Knowles announced that increasing the size of the faculty was his top priority, the number of professors in FAS remains at about 650--as it has for the past 30 years--despite a ten percent increase in undergraduate enrollment over that period.

Even when "non-ladder" faculty (lecturers) are included in the calculation, Harvard's student to faculty ratio of eight to one lags behind those of Yale (7:1) and Princeton (6:1).

Faculty and administrators say the demands of the University's ambitious Core and Freshman Seminar programs and pressures created by professors with extracurricular responsibilities has left many departments struggling to stay afloat.

The groundwork is being laid for the addition of six new positions to FAS in each of the next ten years, as Knowles promised in his annual letter to the faculty.