Freshman Council Will Inaugurate Informal Faculty Speaker Program

The Freshman Council is borrowing an idea from the Kennedy Institute of Polities -- informal meetings between a celebrity and a small group of students -- and is incorporating it into an extensive faculty-freshman speakers program.

Perhaps it is more than coincidence that the new program will be initiated by two members of the Kennedy Institute. Barney Frank '62, special assistant to the director of the Institute and Jonathan Moore, a fellow of the Institute, will conduct a post mortem of the recent elections at 7:30 p.m. Sunday in the Union's Parlor B. In the Kennedy Institute style, there will only be 100 tickets.

Jay Burke '70 chairman of the Speakers Committee of the Freshman Council, said last night that the Freshman-faculty speakers program will have three divisions:

* monthly meetings in Parlor B, like the one Sunday, by well-known Harvard Faculty members. Fifteen of the 100 tickets available for each meeting will be saved for Cliffies.

* dinner two or three times a week with professors, teaching fellows, and graduate students in the Union mirror room. These gatherings will be limited to 20-25 freshmen.

* common room sherry hours with faculty for individual freshman entries.

Dinner Hours

Besides kicking off the program Sunday, Kennedy Institute people will participate in the dinner hours -- one will dine in the Union each Tuesday evening. Most often, they will be Institute fellows.

But Frank said yesterday that men such as Richard E. Neustadt, director of the Institute, and Institute members Adam Yarmolinsky '43, professor of Law, and Daniel P.Moynihan, director of the Joint Center for Urban Studies, would probably also take part.

"This is consistent with our policy of having as many people as possible make as many informal, small appearances as possible," Frank said.

Science Table

Another side of the dinner program is a science table which will meet about every two weeks "with some big name in science," Burke said. Ten or fifteen freshmen will be assigned to the table for the entire year, he said. But he didn't know how the select group would be chosen.

The last part of the three-part program--the sherry hours -- has flickered into existence in the past on the initiative of proctors and senior advisors. "We hope to make this a more regular thing by giving the council representative in each entry a list of interesting people, and encouraging him to set up the sherry hours," Burke said.

Alan Austin '70, president of the Freshman Council, said he was pleased with the work of Burke's committee. "We're trying to get away from the old image of the Council as the group that just runs the mixers," he said.