As the curricular review report was released, members of the curricular review working groups expressed mixed feelings about the structure of their deliberations and the deans’ presentation of their findings.

While most students and Faculty involved in the review said they feel the report, which was released publicly for the first time yesterday, was a fair and accurate distillation of their 15 months of work, others said that they were disturbed to see some of their main points omitted as well as some unexpected points included.

In addition, members expressed frustration that the brief timetable of the review precluded the possibility of everyone on the review being completely up to date and in agreement at all times.

In its introduction, the report acknowledged such difficulties and the impossibility of pleasing all parties.

“We have considered a wide range of proposals, and not everyone who has contributed to this review will agree with all of its recommendations,” read the report.

The work of the review was delegated to four separate committees—the Working Group on Concentrations, the Working Group on Pedagogy, the Working Group on General Education and the Working Group on Overall Academic Experience.

These committees, which began meeting late last spring, are not currently scheduled to meet in their official capacity again.

The 50 committee members included Faculty and graduate and undergraduate students, each of whom “had a specific opinion about every single issue,” said Zachary S. Podolsky ’04, a member of the Working Group on the Overall Academic Experience.

The working groups submitted their final recommendations to the deans earlier this month and waited until last Thursday to read a draft of the final report, which was compiled by Associate Dean of the College Jeffrey Wolcowitz.

Working Group on Pedagogy member Joseph K. Green ’05 said some working group members were surprised by certain recommendations presented in the deans’ report—such as its proposal to switch Harvard to a Yale-style housing system. At Yale, first-years are assigned upperclass housing before they start fall semester.

All members of the curricular review received a draft copy of the report last Thursday and were asked to submit their comments by Sunday.

The eight students of the committees convened over that time to compile and submit their suggestions to Wolcowitz together.

“We said we were surprised by the freshman housing thing; we thought that advising hadn’t been worked out to the level of detail we thought it should be; we wanted to see more on peer advising...they incorporated some of it and some of it they didn’t,” Green said.

Green added that the pedagogy committee had spent considerable energy proposing the creation of an institute to study pedagogy, which did not appear in its proposed form in the report.

Dean of the College Benedict H. Gross ’71 said Wolcowitz, the principal author of the report, had done his best to be truly representative of the findings of the committees.