Two Groups Coordinate Interdisciplinary Research

Noise pollution, health care delivery, the use of computers, the legal problems of women--there are students and faculty members all over the University who are interested in working on social problems like these. The problem is getting them together.

Two groups--Projects Network Office and People's Switchboard--worked throughout the summer assembling information on interests within the University. They hope that the information will lead to more collaborative and interdisciplinary work, new courses, and new curricular structures at Harvard.

The Projects Network staff--ten students from Harvard, Radcliffe, and a number of the graduate schools--have put together a sort of Whole Earth Catalog of courses, faculty research projects, and student action groups throughout the different schools which are focusing on certain social problems and problem areas.

People's Switchboard is much more "College-centered" and includes academic interests extending beyond social issues, according to Daniel A. Gensler '72, one of the two students who originated and worked on People's Switchboard this summer. The two sought information from all Corporation appointees within the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Through their questionnaires, they reached research associates, administrators, and museum and library personnel as well as professors.

Information collected from the 500 responses which Switchboard received will be available in files kept at a central location, probably in the basement of Stoughton Hall.

Gensler and Switchboard co-founder John M. Farago '72 are members of the Education Resources Group (ERG), which consists of the student members of the Committee on Undergraduate Education (CUE) and all those who were nominated by the Houses for the committee--following the committee's final selection last year, the nominees decided to stay together in a group to work with and alongside the CUE, Gensler said.

Projects Network Office includes a number of faculty members as well as students, though the initiative came chiefly from students, according to William H. Bossert '59, Gordon McKay Professor of Applied Mathematics, a faculty member in the group. The group's summer work and the cost of printing the catalog were supported from a Ford Urban Seminars grant to Harvard, administered by Dean Dunlop, Lawrence E. Fouraker, dean of the Business School, and Albert M. Sacks, dean of the Law School, and by small additional contributions from the deans of almost every faculty.

Catalogs are not being distributed automatically to everyone at the University, due to lack of funds, but any person who has not received a catalog and wants one, should contact the Projects Network Office at Langdell Hall L-6, at the Law School.

Both Gensler, of People's Switchboard, and John B. Davidson, a third year law student and one of the prime movers behind Projects Network Office, described their programs as a means to overcome structural barriers within the University which create "disincentives"--in Davidson's words--leading away from interdisciplinary and "in fact, all collective" work.

President Bok and Stephen B. Farber '63, administrative assistant to the President, have expressed considerable interest--in--both projects, according to Gensler and Davidson. "They're waiting to see what kind of reaction our catalog is going to get, what kind of constituency develops, before doing more," Davidson commented.

...putting together a sort of 'Whole Earth Catalog' of courses and research options.