Wilcox to Ask CEP for Wider Course Choices

Edward T. Wilcox, director of the new committee on Gen Ed, will recommend to the CEP at its meeting this Thursday that the list of courses regularly open to freshmen be expanded. Wilcox will also propose the elimination of the present rule that permits only two such courses for concentration.

If the recommendation is approved by the CEP and the faculty, Wilcox said yesterday, the dean of freshmen will ask the professors of middle-level courses with significant freshman enrollments whether they want to continue signing freshman study cards.

Under the present rules freshman must get special permission to take courses which are not on the list of regularly open electives.

The net effect of the recommendation, according to Wilcox, would be to allow professors to add their courses to that list and thus to "reduce paper work."

The change "is less a policy issue than a technical issue," Wilcox said, but he noted that it will nevertheless have a significant impact on the freshman program. He believes it will encourage advisors to regard the list as restricting freshmen to certain courses but as recommending certain courses for them. Many freshmen who would be qualified to take middle-level courses and would be welcomed by professors are discouraged from enrolling by the need to get special permission.

The requirement that no more than two courses on the list be counted for concentration dates from 1909 when Harvard switched from the elective system to the system of distribution and concentration. And "since then," Wilcox explained, "all sorts of fields have made exceptions to the rule."