The College’s anomalous academic calendar—replete with its late start and post-Christmas exams—could be up for a historic alteration.

Citing inconveniences caused by increasingly widespread cross-registration, Harvard administrators announced yesterday the creation of a committee charged with bringing in line the 10 separate calendars in effect across the University.

The Committee on Calendar Reform will be composed of members from all of the University’s faculties, two undergraduates and three graduate students, and will work in tandem with the College’s curricular review process.

The committee’s creation could mean the biggest change in a century to the College’s schedule, which differs from those of several other Harvard schools as well as most colleges nationwide.

Undergraduates are the last to register for classes, and take their exams while many professional students are already registering for spring classes.

Pforzheimer University Professor Sidney Verba ’53, who will chair the committee, said that moving exams is an option that will be considered.

“Whether it would involve exams before Christmas is one thing we would look into,” Verba said.

According to Secretary of the Faculty John B. Fox Jr. ’59, Harvard undergraduates have sat for post-Christmas exams since 1903.

But the University is bigger than any one of its parts, President Lawrence H. Summers is fond of saying, and the new scrutiny of calendars has sprung from this philosophy.

Summers proposed the committee at a retreat with the deans of all the schools this summer.

Committee members said that Summers and the deans hope that a greater consistency in calendars will make it easier for students to take advantage of the University’s vast resources. A press statement announcing the committee cited relieving widespread student frustration as a related aim.

It remains to be seen whether the end result will be a single University

calendar or simply a set of guidelines for exam and registration scheduling. Another possibility is a trimester system, like that of Stanford College.

“I don’t think there’s any prejudgment as to what the final result will be,” said Dean of the College Benedict H. Gross ’71. “The idea is to try to consider all of us as parts of a whole.”

“The goal is to make it more possible for undergraduates to take advantage of first-class professional schools, which is impossible if the schedules don’t coordinate,” said Jones Professor of American Studies Lizabeth Cohen, a member of the new calendar committee. “The calendars don’t necessarily have to be exactly the same, the semesters just have to happen at the same time.”