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Gross Lays Out Report Details

In an interview last night, one member of a curricular review working group said this issue had hardly been discussed in the committees.

“The most shocking thing in the final report was the proposed change to freshman housing. It is an issue fraught with problems, yet was barely talked about in the working groups at all,” the working group member wrote in an e-mail. “Decisions like these shouldn’t be taken without proper deliberation.”

Working group members were allowed to view the report last Thursday and were asked to submit any comment to Wolcowitz by yesterday.

Other issues Gross touched upon included the structure of advising at Harvard and the future of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) in Allston.

He spoke about the likelihood of a creating a central advising office that would be responsible for training advisers and coordinating the advising students get both before and after they elect concentrations.

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“I want to get many, many more advanced faculty involved [in advising],” he said.

“We all know that no one person can advise us successfully here,” he added.

A task force within the working group on pedagogy also suggested that exams be moved to before winter break, Gross said, expressing his belief that doing so would provide more of a vacation for students, leading to less stress and eventually, fewer mental health issues.

“I think the calendar is the way to solve a mental health problem,” he said.

Gross said that among the groups’ other recommendations would be a proposal to make at least one semester of a foreign language mandatory for all students.

Council President Matthew W. Mahan ’05 said the council’s response to Gross’s summary of the report was overall a positive one.

“I think there was a very positive reaction,” Mahan said after the meeting. “On the whole, I feel Dean Gross has done a tremendous job at reaching out...and has made a really strong commitment to student input. He works [with] students on a much more equal playing field than other administrators have in the past.”

Mahan added, however, that he felt as though not as much emphasis was given to advising and to the quality of instruction as there should have been.

“It seemed like the quality of teaching and advising is really not as much of a priority as students would like it to be,” he said. “I think that students would put that as a top priority and the review put it more of the middle of the list.”

—Staff writer Laura L. Krug can be reached at krug@fas.harvard.edu.

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