[Oh No, Not Again!]

APLETHORA OF bracketed courses, numerous visiting professors, consistently high undergraduate enrollments and spotty coverage of new fields in the discipline make studying history at Harvard a traumatic experience for many students. Although the History Department offerings are usually plentiful, the annual variation in courses has long been a cause of concern.

The seemingly random appearances of courses from the introductory level on up leaves many students with perennial scheduling problems and makes formulating a plan of study largely an academic exercise.

The high rate of turnover for history courses is a result of deliberate policy, however, according to Dumbarton Oaks Professor of Byzantine History Angeliki Laiou, the Department's chair. Laiou says that the present policy leads to increased offerings which make them more interesting, broader in context, and more attractive to students.

But for many students the variety of courses has not been attractive enough to balance erratic offerings. Two years ago the Academics Committee of the Undergraduate Council issued a report suggesting, among other things, a more limited number of bracketed courses, and a more consistent offering of European history courses.

The problem has been compounded in the past few years since at least three of the History Department's most popular professors--Laiou, John Womack, Jr., and Steven E. Ozment--have been saddled with time-consuming administrative posts. Although Harvard has fewer faculty members in administrative posts than other schools, such duties are inevitable. But a wider distribution of administrative responsibilities among the faculty would decrease the burden on individual faculty members to free them for teaching responsibilities and would also promote greater contact between faculty and students.

Laiou notes that over the last five years, the department has consistently been accomodating more than 400 undergraduate concentrators, while the overall enrollment in history courses has been between 3,800 and 5,000 students. The department's policy has been to "offer as many specialized courses as possible on different topics, areas, and historical periods." There is obviously much to be said for this policy.

But even with such great variety not all student needs are or can be accomodated. If we skim through the course catalog we will not find much on, for example, modern history of the countries of the European periphery, such as Italy, Greece, or the Scandinavian countries. Moreover, the development of new fields within the discipline over the past three decades, notably social history and the history of women, has made complete coverage a Promethean task. Offerings from visiting professors are an insufficient solution. There is a point, then, in trying to be diverse, but diversity does not benefit students if the courses they need are only offered once every three years.

The problems in the History Department are, to some extent, inevitable, but much can be done to ameliorate them. A student-faculty committee to provide students with input into decisions about course offerings is a necessary first step. Flashy course offerings are great, but a little more stability would be a boon not only to history concentrators, but also to the many undergrads at Harvard who leaf longingly through the History Department's fabulous list of course offerings only to discover that the courses they want to take were offered last year or will be given sometime before the year 2000.