Munching on Noch’s pizza at a Dunster House study break in early March, University President Lawrence H. Summers prophesied that the current Harvard College curricular review would be “the most comprehensive review of Harvard’s curriculum in a century.”

But Summers may have bitten off more than the administrators he charged with leading the review can chew.

After a year’s work by administrators and a select contingent of faculty and students, the review has produced a 67-page document, 57 recommendations, four new committees—and more than a plateful of criticisms.

Many professors complain that the rushed, oblique process prevented adequate discussion from taking place, leaving their voices unheard or, at best, under-represented in the final report, issued this April.

Faculty say the report’s primary problem lies in its lack of a guiding principle that informs all of the recommendations. But one of the primary authors of the report, Associate Dean of the College Jeffrey Wolcowitz, says that a more clearly defined “guiding philosophy will emerge” in the coming year.

The recommendations call for the Core to be replaced by a set of distributional requirements and new survey classes, a one-semester delay in the concentration choice deadline, increased emphasis on the sciences and international experiences, as well as a possible switch to a Yale-style housing system that would assign first-years to an upperclass House before entering the College.

But without a driving thesis to unite the disparate recommendations and with the report’s release mired in controversy surrounding the review process, the administration has thus far failed to garner much faculty support—a necessary ingredient to any successful overhaul of undergraduate education.

Administrators say they plan to bring many of the proposals before faculty for debate next year, though some changes are not contingent on faculty approval.

“It’s [the College administration’s] hope that there will be agreement within the faculty next year,” Summers said at the Dunster study break.

But much work remains if the faculty is to swallow this review, especially if faculty perceive this review as a top-down effort concentrated in the hands of administrators, including Summers, who several current administrators say was chomping at the bit to get his fingers—but not his fingerprints—on the review.

“I’m a little worried at the moment that it will not be debated in the open-spirited manner it deserves,” says former Dean of Undergraduate Education William M. Todd III, who says he nonetheless agrees with most of the report’s recommendations. “That is not a problem of content, but more in terms of the direction in which the community is headed...Part of it is people’s fear of where Harvard is going under President Summers.”

A MATTER OF PRINCIPLE

Harvard’s last two curricular reviews, in the 1940s and 1970s, each pioneered tenets of undergraduate education that came to dominate Harvard and the rest of the nation. The 1945 review under then-University President James B. Conant ’14 essentially invented the idea of general education; its report, the “Redbook,” sold 40,000 copies in a few years. Former Dean of the Faculty Henry A. Rosovsky’s 1979 review invented the Core and a system of “approaches to knowledge” that became popular nationwide.

This April’s report, by contrast, has been widely critiqued by faculty for its lack of a guiding principle—something which Wolcowitz, author of the report, freely admits.

“The report did not have a guiding philosophy of general education on the order of ‘general education in a free society’ in 1945, or even the Core’s ‘approaches to knowledge,’” Wolcowitz writes in an e-mail. “I expected a clearer guiding philosophy to emerge as requirement areas get defined.”