“If [Gross] were to take that straight to [Faculty] legislation, there would be a little bit of a backlash,” Mahan said. “To some extent I would say this is a lesson learned from preregistration.”
Kirby said the new committees will include both students and faculty members, and Mahan said the Undergraduate Council would be primarily responsible for selecting the students.
Also at yesterday’s meeting, in a move that will change the face of graduate student financial aid, Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Peter T. Ellison announced that beginning this fall, the school will be able to offer full dissertation fellowships to all incoming students in the humanities and social sciences.
All humanities and social sciences graduate students working on their dissertations will now be guaranteed full support and not have to teach during their last year.
Higginson Professor of History and of East Asian Languages and Civilizations Philip A. Kuhn, who has expressed concern at the last two Faculty meetings about how the curricular review would affect graduate student funding, said he supports the change and hopes that funding increases continue.
“It’s a good first step,” Kuhn said. “We still have to choose teaching fellows without regard to their level of preparation or aptitude or temperament. Some day we will advance to the point where teaching undergraduates at Harvard will be regarded as an honor and not a job,” he added.
MIXED REVIEWS
The professors and students who spoke yesterday expressed varying opinions about the curricular review report. While they lauded several specific recommendations, some also criticized the report for lacking an overall vision.
“While I appreciate the report’s broad contours...it still remains to develop a guiding vision,” said Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures Julie A. Buckler at the meeting. She later wrote in an e-mail that such a vision is essential in defining “what a good ‘liberal education in the arts and sciences’ should ideally look like today in its diverse individual incarnations.”
Buttenweiser University Professor Stanley H. Hoffmann said that while Harvard’s previous two curricular reviews were founded on clear visions, this one is not.
“This time, we have an interesting document, but one that lacks a rationale,” he said.
Professor of Latin Kathleen M. Coleman, who served on the Working Group on Concentrations, said she noticed fundamental disconnects in the way the process played out.
Coleman said that, aside from the Steering Committee composed of the working group chairs, “none of the working groups collaborated with any of the others.”
Though she served on a working group, Coleman said she was surprised by the report’s suggestion that concentrations require no more than 12 courses.
“We did not discuss the issue of capping concentration requirements, although such a suggestion found its way into the report,” Coleman said.
Gutman Professor of Latin American Affairs John H. Coatsworth said he supported the new University-wide calendar endorsed in the report because it would facilitate study abroad—another one of the report’s recommendations.
“First, the new calendar will end the academic year earlier, so students will be in a better position to take advantage of summer study and internship opportunities with early start dates and to combine international experiences with other summer activities.” Coatsworth said. “Second, the new calendar would also make it possible to create new foreign study opportunities for College students during the month of January.”
—Staff writer Joshua D. Gottlieb can be reached at jdgottl@fas.harvard.edu.
—Staff writer Laura L. Krug can be reached at krug@fas.harvard.edu.