“I have never heard a colleague or an undergraduate say he or she suffers from having too little to do here. In fact, quite the opposite,” said Gomes. “For some of us, at one time, [January] had the appearance of a brief respite. That plan [4-1-4] has initial liabilities in terms of the psychic and mental health of the faculty.”

Mansfield echoed Gomes’ sentiments over the loss of relaxation time in January.

“I think a January term will be a hard sell,” Mansfield said. “More teaching time and less time for reflection and relaxation. That’s what first occurs to me and, I’m sure, to most people.”

Professor of Government Lisa M. Martin, co-chair of the Committee on the Overall Academic Experience, said she was not surprised by the concern about the calendar changes.

“People are going to be very worried about it,” she said. “But I think we’ve presented it honestly. We just need to think about a way to make it work for everybody.”

Martin updated the Faculty about her group’s work in developing additional international opportunities for Harvard’s students.

“A significant international experience should be an important and expected part of a Harvard College experience,” Martin said. To make this a reality, she said the group is looking to expand the palette of experiences students might pursue abroad, from the traditional academic semester to jobs and internships to language immersion.

Martin also addressed the issue of integrating extracurricular activities—especially in the realm of public service and the arts—into the curriculum itself.

While she made it clear that students would probably not receive academic credit for such activities, she also said the group would look into creating more courses in the arts.

Commenting on the structure of the freshman year, Martin also suggested that students might benefit from taking a “significant portion” of their first-year courses pass/fail, and ended her presentation on the subject of advising and how to centralize resources, possibly through the creation of an Office of Advising.

The other three task forces of Cohen’s pedagogy committee are examining the way the College teaches its students writing, the way teaching in general is done and how students learn most effectively, and how to increase both supervised research opportunities for students and the use of technology in order to foster contact between instructors and students.

Eric Jacobsen, co-chair of the committee on general education, began his presentation with a working definition of general education itself—a part of the curriculum that will ensure that students develop multiple perspectives on themselves and the world around them.

He said his committee had examined four models of general education, employed by different schools around the country.

The closed-distribution system, currently employed by Harvard and the University of Chicago, requires students to choose from an array of courses designed to fill core requirements. The open-distribution system, which allows students to choose departmental courses that satisfy broad area requirements, is used at Yale and Stanford. The other two options are the core class system, in which common courses would be required of all students, and the free choice model—which trusts that students, without any requirements at all, will work distribution into their course selections by their own free will.

Free choice, Jacobsen said, is the only model that the group has definitively ruled out.