By LAURA L. KRUG

Crimson Staff Writer

Voting on specific recommendations of Harvard’s third-ever curricular review will likely begin this spring—earlier than previously announced—though several important potential changes will not go through a Faculty vote.

Dean of the Faculty William C. Kirby said yesterday that there will be far fewer Faculty votes than proposals.

Although Faculty members are required to vote on any matters that will affect graduation requirements, some of the most controversial proposals of the review—including assigning freshmen to Houses before they arrive and moving toward a more centralized advising system—ultimately rest on the opinions of College administrators.

“It’s really a very small number that would boil down and we would say, those are what would require the vote of the Faculty,” Kirby said.

Professors will vote on the central aspect of the review—changes to the general education requirement and last year’s recommendation to replace the Core Curriculum with a distribution requirement system supplemented by a set of Harvard College Courses.

Likewise, a potential requirement that students take one term of a foreign language, as well as a proposed cap on concentration requirements, both of which came out of last year’s Report on the Harvard College Curricular Review, will require a vote of the full Faculty.

Although that report, which stemmed from a year’s worth of work by four committees, offered a number of specific recommendations, Kirby appointed new committees this year to revise those recommendations.

Johnstone Professor of Psychology Steven Pinker, who is a member of the new General Education Committee, said the group is still concentrating on generalities.

“We haven’t made a lot of progress toward anything concrete,” he said. “We’re still discussing first principles: ‘What should an undergraduate know?’”

Though he said this back-to-basics approach has been “informative for me and it’s good to get back to foundations,” he said he feels there is some sense of redundancy in the work.

“It does seem that we are, in a way, starting over,” Pinker said.

Although Kirby said last month that he hoped to have concrete proposals by the end of the year, the committees are aiming to finish ahead of that schedule.

“The aspiration for all of these committees—and I want to emphasize, aspiration—is to have their recommendations in hand toward the end of the semester, so the faculty can consider them at the end of the academic year,” Kirby said.