The Envelopes, Please

At Harvard, if you have a problem you form a committee. For a big problem, you form lots of committees. So for the Core Curriculum, the administration set up eight committees--seven subcommittees and one standing committee-to oversee it all.

This week Dean Rosovsky gathered together the seven professors he picked to head each subcommittee, two other deans and two students, for the first meeting of the standing committee.

Those in attendance described the meeting as organizational--they decided when to meet again and began to grapple with the problems of finding courses for the Core and ironing out details of the requirements.

Rosovsky's choices for the standing committee include some veterans of the early Corewars. James Q. Wilson, Shattuck Professor of Government, chaired the task force on the Core set up in 1975, that constructed the first version of the Core. Wilson now heads the subcommittee on Social and Philosophical Analysis, one of the five Core areas of study.

Heading the History subcommittee is Bernard Bailyn, Winthrop Professor of History, who was influential in redesigning Wilson's Core to look more like the version the Faculty passed last spring.

The committee wouldn't be the real thing if it did not have some issues on which to disagree, and if their past actions are any indication, the committee members will have some lively discussions ahead.

One question that promises to be controversial is how loose to make the rules allowing students to by-pass Core courses with departmental offerings or to switch one half-course requirement to another area of study.

Before they can take any major actions, the committee members must wait for Rosovsky to appoint more members in the next week or two. Only two subcommittees--for Expository Writing and the math requirement--now have all their members.