Board Reorganizes Visiting Committees

The Board of Overseers has initiated this fall a reorganization of its visiting committee structure.

The 66 Visiting Committees will now report to seven new Standing Committees instead of to the full board. Non-overseers will, for the first time, be permitted to chair the committees.

Three of the new Standing Committees will deal with general problems relating to student life, institutional policy and administration. The other four--the Natural and Applied Sciences, Social Studies, Humanities and Arts and Schools and Institutions Committees--will discuss the reports of Visiting Committees examining academic areas of the University.

Each of the 30 overseers will now chair only one Visiting Committee. The rest of the chairmen will be picked from among qualified professionals, Lawrence F. Stevens, secretary of the Visiting Committees, said yesterday.

Stevens called the committee restructuring "fairly significant," and said that the changes would improve the efficiency of the board by reducing the number of reports it would have to hear.

The creation of the Standing Committees to screen reports will increase the timeliness of the Visiting Committees' observations and will enable the board "to look for interrelationships" among reports dealing with the same general subject, Stevens said.

Helen H. Gilbert, chairman of the Committee to Visit Harvard and Radcliffe Colleges, said the decision to hire professionals to chair Visiting Committees was made because "sometimes there's no overseer with some kind of basic knowledge in a particular field."