Hall said many professors would not miss the program because its students are relatively weak and the faculty is already busy.

“The question of should we continue it has been seriously broached—and not answered yet,” Lamberth said.

The committees also emphasized a compelling need to strengthen the requirements of the professional degrees—the M.T.S. and the M.Div. That recommendation is in line with Summers’ insistence that the professional degrees have “real requirements.”

Lamberth says the committees recommended limiting the courses that fulfill certain requirements rather than cutting down on electives.

Under the current system, the curriculum is divided into three areas—Area I, “Scripture and Interpretation;” Area II, “Christianity and Culture;” and Area III, “Religions of the World.” Virtually every course offered by HDS—including classes offered jointly with other schools at the University—falls into one of those three areas.

And because the current degree curriculums require only that students take a given number of courses from each area, students can fulfill their requirements by taking “fringe” classes. The result is that those students graduate from HDS lacking a fundamental understanding of the areas themselves.

Hall says the school’s curriculum might have lost focus in drifting too far away from “obligation” and toward “freedom.”

Dunphy Professor of the Practice in Religion, Ethnicity, and International Conflict David Little agrees, saying professional degrees at HDS might have lost meaning due to insufficient requirements. And he emphasizes the importance of redefining the degrees.

“I think that just having a vague degree is perhaps not what the Divinity School should be doing,” he says. “The professional definition is a key concern.”

But with the explosive growth of non-Christian religious study at HDS over the last 20 years, the laxness of degree requirements is not the only reason to reconsider the three-area curriculum structure.

“We want to continue to train women and men for religious service and leadership both in Christian and Unitarian churches and much more widely in American and other societies of the 21st century,” Graham writes in an e-mail.

The school’s area system makes this development particularly difficult to address. Areas I and II have traditionally been the school’s protestant Christian core, with all other religious studies relegated to Area III.

“The curriculum as it stands now...is fundamentally Christian in structure,” Lamberth says.

Many charge that Area III marginalizes non-Christian religious study.

“That area doesn’t strike anyone as appropriate or compelling,” Lamberth says.