Faculty Refocuses On Curricular Review

The Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) refocused on the curricular review yesterday evening, spending most of yesterday’s meeting discussing recommendations from the curricular review regarding secondary concentrations, concentration choice, and the teaching of writing and speaking at the College.

There were no votes at the meeting, but draft legislation for some recommendations was presented to the full Faculty for the first time.

Dean of the Faculty William C. Kirby said he hopes that there will be votes on the concentration recommendations at the next meeting of the full Faculty, scheduled for Tuesday, April 4.

“The last few weeks have been difficult and unusual ones,” Kirby said, an apparent reference to the recent resignation of University President Lawrence H. Summers. But he stressed that it is important “to turn undeterred to the work of the Faculty....We should remain on track.”

Summers and Kirby will both step down from their posts on June 30.

The first draft legislation to be presented regarded the establishment of secondary fields. Under the proposal, created by the curricular review’s Educational Policy Committee (EPC), students would be able to take four to six half courses in a field other than their primary concentration and receive credit for it on their academic transcript.

Berkman Professor of Psychology Elizabeth S. Spelke ’71, the EPC member who presented the proposal, said that the committee intended for secondary concentrations to serve students who have a desire to study more than one field without having to also complete the integrated thesis required of joint concentrators.

Spelke added that she hoped secondary concentrations would expose students to concentrations they might not normally focus on.

“A very large number of students are served by a very small number of departments,” she said, adding that it is “desirable to find some mechanisms to allow students to explore more broadly.”

Dean of the College Benedict H. Gross ’71 told parents over Junior Parents Weekend earlier this month that secondary concentrations could potentially be retroactively applied to students in the classes of 2007 and beyond, but no schedule of implementation was discussed at the meeting yesterday.

Another EPC member, Pearson Professor of Modern Mathematics and Mathematical Logic Warren Goldfarb ’69, presented draft legislation that would move the concentration choice deadline back by a semester, from the end of students’ second semester to the end of their third semester.

“[The recommendation’s] purpose should be fairly obvious—it’s to facilitate more intellectual exploration in a wider array of areas,” Goldfarb said during the meeting.

The current system of requiring students to declare concentrations during their first spring “inclines them to think about the wrong sort of thing in freshman year,” he added.

Early recommendations for delaying concentration choice were criticized by some science and engineering professors, who were concerned that students in their fields­—where concentrations often require a fairly rigid sequence of courses—would be ill-served by a later concentration choice deadline if there was not an increase in advising for those students.

But at least some of those concerns appeared to be assuaged yesterday, as the EPC added to their draft legislation a requirement that students meet with at least one concentration adviser from a concentration they are considering by the end of their freshman year.

“The essential thing is that the students and some potential concentrations are in touch” during freshman year, Goldfarb said.

Most of the subsequent discussion about the EPC recommendations focussed on the format of the draft legislation; both the secondary concentration legislation and the concentration choice legislation consisted of only one sentence of actual legislation, followed by a half to a full page “explanatory note.”

Baird Professor of Science Gary J. Feldman said that specific changes to the curriculum should be explicitly laid out in the main body of the legislation itself.

“It’s my understanding that the explanatory notes do not have the force of legislation,” Feldman said.

Kirby replied, “it is in the rich tradition of this Faculty to have legislation that is short and explanatory notes that are long.”

President of the Undergraduate Council John S. Haddock ’07 addressed the Faculty at yesterday’s meeting, saying that the student body is “eagerly anticipating the completion of this review.”

“Our curricular review has constituted a great partnership between students and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences,” Haddock said. “It’s time for us to push onward, and I, for one, am optimistic we will do so to the benefit of undergraduates at this College.”

While the EPC recommendations were the central focus of yesterday’s meeting, other topics were touched on as well.

Chair of the Department of English and American Literature and Language James Engell presented the report of the Committee to Review the Teaching of Writing and Speaking, which he chairs.

“Writing and speaking are skills for life in every profession and in each career,” said Engell, who currently teaches an undergraduate course on the elements of rhetoric. “The teaching of writing and speaking requires a more prominent place in the curriculum.”

And Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS) Theda Skocpol announced a number of new initiatives within the GSAS at yesterday’s meeting, including the creation of a secondary field in film and visual studies for PhD students and the availability of $15,000 to $25,000 in seed grants to fund planned improvements in graduate education.

—Staff writer Evan H. Jacobs can be reached at ehjacobs@fas.harvard.edu.