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President Bolt's Annual Report to the Board of Overseers this week dealt only marginally with the issue that have figured significantly in the University this year.
Instead of discussing in detail issues like Harvard's ownership of Gulf Oil stock. Bok elected to devote most of the 24-page report (which he presented orally on Tuesday) to delineating his thoughts on the delineating his thoughts on the purposes of undergraduate education and the means by which those purposes could best be achieved.
He said undergraduate education has lost much of his old rationale, and set forth several interesting innovations he said would help to restore the connection between means and ends in undergraduate work.
He explained that "the task at hand involves more of a gradual change in emphasis than a basic restructuring."
He recommended that departments as well as the Committee on General Education devote more thought to the relationship between their fields of interest and the purposes of undergraduate education.
Bok also advised that increased attempts he made to give students "more information and advice and written in ways that give some thought to the connection between the curriculum and the more enduring purposes of undergraduate education."
He specifically recommended that course catalogues be beefed up to include "added material of value to students in choosing their programs."
Bok further advised that methods of instruction that "emphasize the training and disciplining of the mind" be encouraged, As examples of such methods, he cited the seminar, section and tutorial, and he recommended that Faculty members move back into these kinds of academic arenas instead of abandoning them to graduate students.
Bok called for a "special attempt" to improve the freshman year, which he said provides "by far the best opportunity to have a constructive impact on the minds of the students."
"It is important to increase the number of freshman year, which he said provides "by far the best opportunity to have a constructive impact on the minds of the students."
"It is important to increase the number of freshman seminars, improve the quality of the basic course in expository writing, and encourage the highest quality of instruction in the sections of the large freshman courses," he explained.
He also called for an increased emphasis on the arts. "Competent supervision in the arts seems well worth encouraging even if credit is not offered, for students seem to enroll in large numbers even on an extracurricular basis," he observed.
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