Keeping Track . . .

Harvard's undergraduate student body may not be as pre-professional as some people claim, but looking at this semester's top ten classes, you'd never know. Social Analysis 10, "Principles of Economics," once again topped the list of high-enrollment courses, with Ronald Dworkin's "Philosophy of Law" coming in not far behind. Biology 7a--the introductory bio course--rounded out the popularity troika with 422 students enrolled.

Despite its comparative popularity, Soc Anal 10 currently has only 937 students enrolled--nearly 100 fewer than last year. Otto Eckstein, Warburg Professor of Economics, attributed the decline to two false fire alarms in Sanders Theater that interrupted the course's first lecture last fall.

Dworkin, a visiting professor of Philosophy from Oxford, said last week he originally intended to teach Moral Reasoning 21 as a discussion course, but moved the class to Sanders Theatre when nearly 800 students showed up.

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Francis H. Burr, a member of the Harvard Corporation for 28 years, will retire this spring, leaving the first vacancy in two years on the University's seven-man governing board.

The Corporation's six remaining members will begin a search for Burr's replacement this spring and hope to choose a new Corporation member within a year.

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Fifteen appeared to be the magic--or tragic--number last week, as University officials announced percentage tuition hikes of that amount at the College and six Harvard graduate schools.

The cost of one year at the College will rise $1560 to $12,100 next year for tuition, room and board. Tuition fees at Harvard's other schools will include: $8000 at the Business School, $5310 at the Divinity School, $7350 at the School of Public Health, $10,250 at the Medical School, $7900 at the Kennedy School of Government, and $8195 at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

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In the culmination of a seven-month debate, the constitutional convention last week voted to strike a guaranteed minority representation clause from its final plan for a new student government.

Although the turnaround--initiated in an effort to garner necessary Faculty support for a new Undergraduate Council--was unanimously approved by convention members, student leaders criticized the final proposal for its "unrepresentative and unfair" treatment of minorities.

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Speaking at a Harvard Club of Boston luncheon, Sen. Paul Tsongas (D-Mass.) warned last week that a failure on the part of the Reagan Administration to "adequately deal with" nuclear arms control could lead to the demise of NATO and the "Finlandization" of Europe.

Tsongas joined a recent chorus of voices--including those of West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt and French President Francois Mitterrand--in stating that loose talk from U.S. government officials about the "winnability" and "containability" of nuclear war has severely limited the credibility of the Administration among Europeans.

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A head well-used can change the world, some say, but rarely has this proved more true than in the case of a ramapithecus skuli David Pilbeam, professor of Anthropology, discovered during a 1980 expedition to Pakistan.

Two years' examination of the fossil have confirmed that ramapithecus--traditionally thought to be the ancestor of human beings--is really the evolutionary father of the orangutan. The discovery leaves a 14-million-year gap in knowledge about man's lineage.

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Early morning City Council meetings apparently--make for unanimous decisions. At an 8 a.m. meeting Tuesday morning the council decided without opposition to allow city residents the chance to over-ride Prop 2 1/2 with a mid-April referendum. Without a fiscal crisis to rally around, however, the council will probably revert to its normally split voting at next Monday night's regular session.

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For an agency that usually meets in front of no more than a handful of citizens and ordinarily receives little direct scrutiny from the media, the Cambridge Rent Control Board wields tremendous power with its regulations over landlords and tenants. At a meeting Wednesday night, the board refused to find Harvard liable for more than a year of rental overcharges of tenants at 8 Pympton St. Although the official tally, according to the rent board's clerk, was 4-1, the five members never took a formal roll call vote, and two members, as is their custom, sat through the session with their backs three-quarters turned to the half-dozen citizens in the room.

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In its first meeting of the spring term, the Faculty Council began reviewing the Faculty's current grievance procedure because tremendous difficulties arose during the procedure's first and only use last spring.

The professors and administrators on the council discussed allowing complaints besides these that "allege discrimination on the basis of race, color, religious belief, sex, national or ethnic origin, handicap or age" to be included in the procedure.

The council also discussed measures that would tighten up and improve the actual procedure that floundered when Theda Skocpol, then an associate professor, charged in 1980 that the Sociology Department discriminated on the basis of sex in refusing to recommend her for tenure.

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Attempting to prove that once one gets to Harvard, the bonds are never lossened, alumni leaders said last week they will soon begin collecting a list of possible alumni House associates.

Under a plan to bring Harvard graduates back into the Houses, which the Associated Harvard Alumni (AHA) approved last spring and the House Masters approved this fall, six alumni will act as associates of each House.

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Wall Street probably wouldn't recommend investing $100 in a lottery with 777 to I odds, but one Watertown man who did just that is glad he didn't listen to expert advice.

Tod Whittemore, a professional square dance caller, won a three-bed-room condominium worth $70,000 Wednesday night in a fundraising lottery run by the Cambridge YMCA. Although he doesn't usually buy lottery tickets, Whittemore said he made an exeption this time "because it looked like good odds."