Gross will also remain involved in the process, while Summers announced this spring that he is no longer participating in the review.

Some members of the summer group say that working with fewer people will make writing more efficient and that Kirby is not trying to remove some voices from the debate.

“The committee as a whole was unwieldy,” says Menand. “[But] I don’t think anybody’s being excluded.”

However, two members of the committee, speaking on the condition of anonymity, say they were unaware of Kirby’s summer plans for the report until informed by The Crimson, and expressed displeasure that they had not been kept informed.

“It is frustrating because it’s not something that we agreed upon as a committee,” says one committee member. “It would have been nice to have a little more consultation.”

A major goal of the summer subcommittee is to produce a report that is longer and more thorough than the nine-page March report. The Draft Final Report is far shorter than the reports of curricular reviews in past decades, such as the Redbook of the late 1940s, a national bestseller that laid out a theory of a liberal arts education for a post-war American society.

“The Redbook is 300 pages long,” says Menand. “The document we’re presenting is too thin.”

Kirby says he is hopeful that with a more detailed report, the Faculty will grow to understand and accept his committee’s recommendations.

“The elaboration of these issues in a longer report will help clarify some of the recommendations of this committee,” he says.

“I don’t think we’re so far away on things,” Maier says. “I would hope that by September we would have a report.”

While members of the small summer group say they hope to have a report ready by the fall, other members of the General Education committee express doubts that this goal is attainable.

“It’s clear that nothing is going to emerge before the end of the summer,” says Rice, who says scheduling problems held the committee back during the year and expects such problems to continue into the summer.

Another fear is that the work will fail to address the deeper problems that some say plague the report.

“My biggest concern is that [they will] simply dress up the current report and try to push it through in the fall,” says Mahan.

More than a year has passed since an early curricular review committee called for the dissolution of the Core and its replacement with a combination of distribution requirements and vaguely defined Harvard College Courses. After close to 20 committee meetings and countless pages of proposals, Harvard is now only nine pages closer to articulating a new vision for general education, and many of last year’s questions and doubts remain. A few select committee members now find themselves toiling to reach landmarks they hoped to have already passed.

“The work has been slower and more frustrating than any of us expected it would be,” says Menand, but he adds, “it’s work that has to be done.”

—Staff writer Allison A. Frost can be reached at afrost@fas.harvard.edu.

—Staff writer Evan H. Jacobs can be reached at ehjacobs@fas.harvard.edu.