Over 200 members of Yale’s faculty voted to fundamentally change its college curriculum last week.

A majority of professors approved several significant alterations to undergraduate education at Yale: changing distribution requirements, giving faculty councils the power to sort courses into academic areas themselves and—most contentiously—making sure every Yale student graduates having taken at least one foreign language course.

The decision comes as University administrators, faculty and students continue to hash out recommendations for Harvard’s own curricular review, aiming to produce a report by the end of the academic year.

Dean of the College Benedict H. Gross ’71 said the Yale vote was an “encouraging sign” for Harvard.

“The Yale review was more focused than the one we are undertaking,” Gross wrote in an e-mail. “That being said, I think it was quite successful.”

The meeting marked the culmination of Yale’s 16-month curricular review.

Each of the three resolutions passed by comfortable margins at a faculty meeting last Thursday, according to Dean of Yale College Richard H. Brodhead.

“Given the amount of input that went into the recommendations, I have been hoping the faculty would embrace them by a good margin, with some honest dissent of course,” Brodhead wrote in an e-mail. “So the vote Thursday went about as I had expected.”

The committee’s report called Yale’s 30-year-old assortment of distribution requirements “almost spectacularly vague.”

The system mandates taking at least three course credits in each of four broad academic areas—Group I (languages and literatures), Group II (other humanities), Group III (social sciences) and Group IV (mathematics and natural sciences).

But the committee said the distribution requirements don’t effectively guarantee that students graduate with any sort of specific knowledge base or set of skills.

“In the most blatant failure of the current system, whether a course counts for satisfying a distributional requirement is now a function of the instructor’s department,” the report reads, “not its particular intellectual content.”

This, along with a “relative scarcity” of science classes available to non-science majors, creates “a perverse incentive to satisfy the science requirement by seeking the [science courses] with the least scientific content,” according to the report.

And so the committee recommended that requirements be revised so that students will now have to take two classes in each of three areas: the humanities and arts, the social sciences and the natural sciences.

In addition, however, every Yale student will be required to take two writing and two quantitative reasoning-centered courses before graduation.