“People in Mass. Hall were shocked by the positive press...I don’t think they had much faith in what we were doing,” the administrator says. “They were happily surprised...There is a lot of stealing credit going on right now.”

THE BEGINNING OF THE END

With the curricular review’s progress thus far mired with dissension about the process used to generate the recommendations, the University Hall administrators behind the report face an uphill battle as the review enters a year of substantive debate about which recommendations to implement and how to do so.

Some faculty say their lack of participation in the process thus far means they are unenergetic just when their enthusiasm is most needed.

“It’s going to be interesting to find out where that energy is going to come from, because that is going to be necessary,” Kishlansky says.

While faculty prepare to fight over the recently released recommendations of this year’s report, Derek C. Bok, who was University president during the 1979 review, says his review’s first report came after a year of widespread debate and incorporated and reconciled dissenting viewpoints.

In contrast to last April’s report, which bills itself as a set of preliminary recommendations to direct next year’s discussion, the first significant report released to the Faculty in 1978 already contained concrete, fleshed out ideas.

“By the time we got to the final discussions, a lot of differences had been sort of hammered out,” Bok says. “What finally came before the faculty really reflected a hammering out of many of those differences.”

Still, it is unclear to what extent the faculty will need to hammer out some of these recommendations. Though Gross is adamant that faculty will be consulted to some extent on all aspects, Feldman says the administration holds almost complete control over the fate of the review’s proposals.

“To the extent that Dean Kirby agrees with these recommendations, he’ll just implement them,” Feldman says.

Administrators have left it unclear which of the 57 recommendations will be up for Faculty vote and which will be implemented by the administration. Only matters that change academic requirements or the transcript require a Faculty vote, Wolcowitz says.

Lawrence Buell, English department chair and former dean of undergraduate education, says the administration should err on the side of faculty participation on gray areas for which a Faculty vote may or may not be required.

But faculty say administrators have not done much to explain how the remainder of the review will proceed. Administrators plan to form four new working groups—charged with discussing the general education requirement, the Expository Writing program, science education and the proposed changes to the House system—and flesh out other proposals in already existent Faculty committees, though they have not presented specifics on how this process will work.

In terms of a broader discussion on undergraduate education, Feldman notes that next year’s Faculty meetings will provide a maximum of 14 hours of curricular review discussion unless Gross schedules alternative meetings.

“There is some concern on my part that it’s going to be difficult to get everything into the time it is allotted next year,” Feldman says.

—Staff writer William C. Marra can be reached at wmarra@fas.harvard.edu

—Staff writer Lauren A. E. Schuker can be reached at schuker@fas.harvard.edu.