Another major proposal—a recommendation that the College consider assigning first-years to upperclass Houses the summer before they enter the College instead of the blocking system at the end of the first year—came from administrators and was not included in any subcommittees’ recommendation, according to committee member Joseph K. Green ’05.

“We were all sort of blindsided by it,” he says.

Feldman says one of his subcommittee’s chief recommendations, the development of a pedagogical institute to research and improve teaching at Harvard, was cut from the final report, while the group’s recommendation for a January term was “substantially modified.”

In fact, Wolcowitz began writing the final report before all the working groups had submitted their written recommendations, but Gross says time constraints made this an inevitability.

“It would have been impossible to wait for all the final documents before we started writing,” says Gross.

Gross attributes the changes to the difficulties inherent in combining the work of a large number of people.

“Whenever you combine the work of 50 to 60 people, there’s going to be some bending,” he says. “All of it found its way into Jeff Wolcowitz’s head and he wrote it down.”

Green says that while working group members were told they would see a draft of the review at least one week before the report was to be made public, they were only e-mailed a draft the Thursday night before the report was released on Monday, April 26. Moreover, Green says, the secrecy of the review process prevented him and the other student members from “vet[ting] individual ideas before the student body before Wolcowitz’s final report.”

“It’s got to be somewhat strategic,” he says. “The effect was to make us impotent.”

A Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) administrator who worked on the review says they regret not giving the working groups more time to amend the draft before finalizing it.

“The big mistake we made was not giving reports to the working groups earlier,” the FAS administrator says. “Now it all looks kind of conspiratorial.”

The administrator adds that the authors of the final report could not use all the working groups’ materials in the final draft because of their informal styles—often in casual e-mail and bullet-point forms—and not necessarily because the concepts were different. And in the rush to the finish line, some recommendations were omitted and others added without first consulting the working groups.

“We’re doing all this at the last hour,” the FAS administrator says, “so it’s like you’re turning in a paper at the last minute, and you want it to be good, so you’re changing everything at the last minute.”

“I’m not surprised that people feel disenfranchised,” the administrator adds. “Frankly, we moved too fast.”

All this skepticism surrounding the integrity of the process means that many faculty wonder from where the report’s impetus stems.