Reading List Delights Ec 1 Critics; Lowell Students Get a House Section

Lowell House will have its own section of Economics 1 this year as an experiment in linking academics to the Harvard house structure.

Otto Eckstein, professor of Economics and new head of Ec 1, agreed Thursday to set up the section if 27 Ec 1 students in the house sign up. It will meet for the first time a week from today in the Lowell House Library with Robert G. Evans, teaching fellow in Economics, as section man.

Three Lowell House juniors--Kenneth Kaufman, John Palazzo, and Peter Solenberger--had the idea of a house section last spring. Early last week 23 students signed a petition to Eckstein requesting the section and by last night 16 had signed to join the class.

"The House is supposed to bridge the gap between a student's academic and social life," Kaufman said yesterday, "and that's just what we are trying to do."

Eckstein agreed in an interview yesterday that the section should "strengthen the house system." And both he and Kaufman think that Ec 1 discussions overflowing into informal lunch hour talk will improve the course.

The house section is an isolated experiment according to Eckstein prompted largely "by the enahusiasm of the group in Lowell." "We're not thinking ahead--a year from now we'll take stock," he added.

"The more this becomes a general principle, the more problems it raises," Eckstein said. "We never could get all of the course on this system and even coming close we would end up with freshman sections and Radcliffe sections--something we haven't had since World War II.

Even the single experimental section had raised some problems.

Because it was organized late last week, class members will have to be resectioned and Evans' section disbanded. And there are physical problems in using the Lowell House Library as a classroom (wheeling in a blackboard, for instance)--problems which might be more severe in other houses.

When Eckstein received the petition, he scheduled a Thursday luncheon meeting at Lowell House with those who were pushing the idea. Three hours later he had cleared the arrangements with the Economics department and told Kaufman the section was set.

The Lowell House Committee approved Kaufman's proposal last spring. Master of Lowell House, Zeph Stewart, also co-operated by offering to make Evans, who agreed to each the section last spring, a non-resident tutor in the house