THE UNIVERSITY OFCHICAGO V EECORDJune 29, 1979 ISSN 0362-4706 An Official Publication Volume XIII, Number 3CONTENTS71 COLLEGE CURRICULUM COMMITTEE INTERIM REPORT,WINTER 1979111 REPORT AND RECOMMENDATIONS TO THE DEAN OF THECOLLEGE CONCERNING THE USE OF GRADUATE STUDENTS INTHE COLLEGE123 ANNUAL REPORT OF THE STUDENT MENTAL HEALTH CLINIC,1977-1978128 THE UNIVERSITY'S INSTITUTIONAL PATENT AGREEMENTWITH THE DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH, EDUCATION ANDWELFARE133 THE 372ND CONVOCATION ADDRESS: UNIVERSALITY AND THEUNIVERSITY, By Alan Gewirth135 SUMMARY OF THE 372ND CONVOCATION136 REPORT OF THE STUDENT OMBUDSMAN FOR THE WINTERQUARTER, 1979THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGOFOUNDED BY JOHN D. ROCKEFELLERCopyright 1979 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO RECORDCOLLEGE CURRICULUM COMMITTEEINTERIM REPORT, WINTER 1979To: President Hanna H. GrayFrom: Jonathan Z. Smith, Dean of the CollegeMay 25, 1979I am transmitting to you a copy of the interimreport of the Standing Committee on the Curriculum of the College Council.When this committee was first established, Igave it three charges: (1) that it was to inquire intopresent auricular practices rather than proposenew departures, (2) that it was to give special attention to concentration programs, and (3) that itwas to consult broadly. It fulfilled these charges inan exemplary fashion and has produced a comprehensive self-study of historic import.Mr. Taub's memorandum to the College facultyon behalf of the Committee of the College Council, which prefaces the document, properly statesthe way in which the report is to be read.I believe this report to be of immense importance to the entire University community. Withinthe College, it will be the subject of a year-longseries of discussions by the council, the governingcommittees, programs, College advisers, and theStudent Task Force on the Curriculum.To: CoUege FacultyFrom: Committee of the College CouncilApril 30, 1979We are pleased to pass along to you an interimreport of the curriculum committee. Because it islong and requires close reading, you may betempted to put the report aside rather than to readit. However, the report represents the most comprehensive description of the way our College appears to operate which has ever been produced and consequently provides a foundation forthinking about issues relating to curricular practice. Consequently, if you do have any concernabout the sort of College we ought to have, this isan essential document. We wish to propose that,as you read the first twenty-four pages of the document, you ask yourself if the description presented is one that is recognizable to you. No grouphas worked so hard or so systematically to collectinformation about our curricular practice. Yet,this report is not simply a fact-finding one. Instead, information has been synthesized in such away as to find common threads running throughdiverse practices. Therefore, the total picture itpresents may not be one which is familiar to everyone.If the picture represented is a correct one, thesecond question one must ask is if this is the sortof institution we would like to have. Although theframers of the report have attempted to remainneutral on that point, their effort to find underlying rationalities and systematic relationships oftenleads them to sound as if the report represents avote of approval. Those who do not value the sortof institution represented here must be forced toconsider how they would alter existing practice.For those who both share this vision of theCollege and value it, the committee raises severalhard questions and makes some proposals whichdeserve serious consideration.In our judgment, this document provides thebasis for shared discourse in the coming year oncurricular matters conceived most broadly.Discussions of curricular practice often degenerate into questions of whether or not there shouldbe five of this or six of that. Our curriculum committee, by contrast, has provided a basis for discussion of the very heart of our educational practices here in the College. We hope you will takethe opportunity to think through with us the issuesthe committee has raised.71Section I: The committee's charges and activities.Section II: The nature of this report, both what itis and is not intended to be.Section III: A general statement of the main features of current curricular practices in the form ofbasic propositions with commentary.Section IV: The relation of current practices tothe assumptions and expectations expressed in the1964 Levi Memorandum and the 1966 Curriculum Committee report.Section V: Some relatively detailed illustrations ofcertain aspects of current practices presented inSection III.Section VI: What may seem to some, but not tothe committee, to be at this time anomalies orproblems, given present practices.Section VII: Some misleading ways of talkingabout our curricular practices.Section VIII: Problems of accessibility of certainkinds of information, opportunities, and resourceswhich exist or should exist.Section IX: Problems of the coherence of a fewprograms and of diminished activity on the part ofat least some governing committees.Appendix A: Resolutions on advisory functionsand scheduling approved by College Council.Appendix B: Curriculum committee's preliminaryquestions for programs.Appendix C: Number of graduates in each program from 1972 to 1977.Appendix D: 1976 reports by masters on the core.Section IThe College Curriculum Committee was calledinto existence in winter quarter 1978 as a standingcommittee of the College Council. Its purpose isto aid, but not to replace, the deliberations of theCollege Council and other groups about curricularpractices. It is a permanent committee with achanging but overlapping membership chargedwith gathering information for and advising theCollege Council about curricular practices andwith initiating and involving itself in continuingcurricular discussions. Its gathering of information, advising, and discussing are not meant toexclude other groups from these activities. Furthermore, these activities should not be confusedwith the power of the College Council to makefinal judgments about curricular matters.We are aware that a standing committee is aninnovation in the College and, consequently, thatour actions will set precedents for the future.Therefore, we have discussed our intentions withthe dean and the Committee of the College Coun-72 cil at various stages of our inquiry and made regular reports to them to insure that our actions fitour charges. Some details of our activities so farseem to be in order to indicate the ways in whichwe have been fulfilling our basic charges.The committee was asked to report on theproposed new programs in Classical Civilizationand in Social Philosophy and on the proposed substantial curricular changes in the Art History andPhilosophy programs, proposals which the College Council recently approved. The reports werethe result of discussions with the appropriate program faculty. There were two reasons for thesediscussions. One was to gather further information about the proposals. The other was to offerinformation about the curricular devices used andthe various matters taken into consideration byother programs with similar problems and opportunities in their organization of curricular practices. In addition, the reports attempted to provide information by means of which the proposalscould be understood in relation to program patterns presently accepted in the College.We discovered during our various inquiries thatthere were serious conflicts in the scheduling ofcourses, problems in certain areas with advising,and difficulties in determining which studentswere in fact in any one program. We discussedthese matters with the Committee of the CollegeCouncil. Ways of starting to deal with theseproblems, stated in the form of resolutions, werebrought to the attention of and recently approvedby the College Council. The specific resolutionsand some explanation of them are attached as Appendix A.We began the process of informing ourselvesabout recent and present curricular practices bycollecting, reading, and discussing minutes of theCollege Council from 1962 on, reports of earliercurriculum committees, announcements of thecollegiate divisions, and statistical information ofvarious sorts. This process was useful as a startingpoint for our investigations. But it was also intended to generate a literature which future members of the committee could have easy access toand build upon. As an addition to this literature,we have kept memoranda of clarification and ofpotential problems sent to us by various faculty,and we have made internal memoranda of the discussions we have had with others. Though theproduction of such a literature is time consuming,we think it immensely important in order to makepossible the use and extension by future membersof this standing committee of suggestions madeand of work already accomplished.The bulk of our time so far has been spent inmeetings with various groups and in internal discussion about what we learned from them. Wemet with the college advisers a number of timesand with each governing committee. At the sametime, we were constructing a list of questions, attached as Appendix B, which was the basis ofour meetings with faculty from each concentrationin the College. We met with faculty from someconcentrations more than once if we thoughtfurther information or clarification was appropriate. We expect such meetings to continue. Thesemeetings have provided us with much informationabout present practices which it would have beenimpossible to gather in any other way. The publicdocuments we mentioned above are in most casesa very inadequate representation of what is currently being done, why it is being done, what arethe problems each faculty faces, and the expectations faculty have of the future. But these meetings have also been the occasion, in many cases,of our providing information about the workingsof various parts of the College or suggesting alternative curricular possibilities. Faculty have inmany cases been able to put such information andsuggestions to an immediate use and have appreciated our role as a clearinghouse of sortsabout curricular matters.Section IIOne reason for starting our inquiries with meetings with faculty from each concentration was thatpast College-wide discussions of the curriculumhad seemingly neglected what some might call thismajor "part" of the curriculum. Another reasonwas that we thought once we had a better idea ofwhat was in fact done within concentrations, wewould be better able to think about the relations ofthis "part" to other "parts" of the curriculum. Itis not intended that "concentrations" be the solefocus of future curricular investigations. Indeed ithas not been the sole focus of our investigations.Paradoxically, we discovered that faculty, inorder to explain what was being done in concentration work, normally thought it necessary toexplain the relation of this work to what was beingdone in the four-year programs, of which concentration work was only one part. This emphasis onfour-year programs as the basic unit of curricularorganization is, we think, the most important factabout our curriculum that we have to report. Thisfact, together with its implications, is rarely central to our public discussions of curriculum, but itdoes appear to be central to the day-to-day thinking of most faculty. The communication of this fact together with its implications is the main reason why we think such an extended interim reportis necessary. We hope that this report will allowfor a better appreciation of present practices andprovide a vocabulary more appropriate to how wein fact think about what we do. However, we dorecognize that further clarification may be necessary. If it is, we hope that discussion of what weare reporting will indicate where we might bestamplify.At the start of our investigations, we had notexpected such an extended report to be necessary. Our functions as a standing committee,especially when compared to past curriculumcommittees, were certainly not meant to beexhausted by issuing reports on the specific matters which were the charges of previous committees. Our functions were the continuing activitieswe have described above — gathering information,advising, and discussing. These might occasionally require issuing public reports on certain matters. But such reports were not the primary function of this new committee or in any way meant toexhaust its functioning. Since we think this reportto be an atypical one, given our charges, and,since reports of previous curriculum committeeshave perhaps generated expectations of what sucha report should be, we think it necessary to statein some detail what this report is intended and notintended to be.This report is not meant to be:1. a complete report of what we have learned,2. a statement that current practices must be asthey are,3. a document which suggests a new curriculum, or4. a document with recommendations to betranslated into legislation.Rather:1. We have learned much from our discussions.In this report we feature what we consider to bethe most fundamental aspects of the present curriculum, with special emphasis on the changesthat have taken place in the last ten years. Furthermore, part of what we have learned is thatthere is an enormous diversity of practices andthat much ingenuity is evident in the use of common curricular resources for different purposes inthe various four-year programs. We try to givesome examples of this diversity. But these examples are not meant to be a full description of anyone program. Nor does this report pretend to giveall the examples which may be relevant in any onecontext. To put this another way, there appears tobe no one set of distinctions, no one pattern or73typology, which is the key to present practices. Alarge number of these, more or less equally important, is necessary to do justice to the multiplicity of concrete^ functions and relations whichneed to be scrutinized. But any statement aboutthis multiplicity is not meant to be a substitute fora scrutiny of individual programs in their concretefunctioning. Examples are used to illustrate thismultiplicity or diversity. But we, in this report, donot pretend to be providing the diversity in anydetail and our use of examples should not be confused with a detailed scrutiny of individual programs or with the suggestion that the examplesused are necessarily examples of the "best" programs. We hope that what we know about individual programs may be useful on other occasions, as it seems to have been in the past. But wealso realize that we have more to learn and that wemust continue our discussions if for no other reason than that constant though quiet change of curriculum is the rule rather than the exception.2. As was said, we wish to report the generalfeatures of current curricular practices. Manyfaculty seem to think that at least some presentpractices, usually those with which they have little acquaintance except through the rumors provided by their close colleagues, are to some substantial degree mindless. This committee was surprised by its own ignorance about present practices, notwithstanding the preparatory reading wementioned above. Though momentarily comforted by not finding ourselves alone in our ignorance, we were and are troubled that ignorance ofpresent practices is shared by almost all facultywe spoke with, whether in formal meetings or ininformal conversations. This is an ignorance notmerely of the character and activities of concentrations and programs in other collegiate divisions, but often of those in the same division. Wewere impressed by the general lack of mindless-ness in present practices. Our report may soundlike praise of current practices because we dowish to say that present practices are not, in general, mindless, that reasons can be given for whatis being done. But the statement of current practices and the provision of reasons why they arethis way should not be confused with argumentsthat what is must be as it is. To say that currentpractices make sense in general is not to say thatdifferent practices should not be considered orthat the reasons provided should be the only relevant ones. This is a matter to be decided by thereader of this report. ^3 . We do introduce publicly a somewhat newway of talking about our/curriculum. We think that this vocabulary, outlined in the next section,is more appropriate to current practices than someother vocabularies which we have used and stillintend to use publicly. But this use of a differentvocabulary should not be confused with the provision of a new curriculum. We, as a standing com-mitteenare not in the business of devising a newcurriculum, an objective which many think,whether correctly or incorrectly, was or shouldhave been the task of some previous curriculumcommittees.A. We do wish to say that if the readers of ourreport do find our description of present practicesaccurate, do find these practices to be in generalacceptable, and do find our vocabulary appropriate, then we think thought must be given tocertain problems. These problems arise out ofpresent practices and are not easily detachablefrom the description of present practices. Thestatement of such problems and the suggestion ofsome ways of starting to think about and deal withthem are not meant to be and should not be confused with legislative proposals. Rather we offerthem as ways of thinking about the consequencesof accepting or rejecting present practices. Thegeneral statement of present practices in the nextsection and the statement of problems in the lasttwo sections are each a "description" of presentpractices and qualify each other. Everything thatoccurs now cannot in our opinion be simplyaccepted or approved. But, on the Other hand,potential acceptance or approval of present practices in general should not be withheld because itis thought that these problems are somehowunsolvable given present resources. Our suggestions are ways of trying to extend the basic ideasand strategies behind current practices into certainproblem areas and of recognizing the possiblerelations between acceptable practices and problematic consequences. Some of these suggestionshave been made by faculty we have met with andare already being acted upon.Section IIIThe basic units of curricular organization in theCollege are the various four-year programs. Anyone of these is made up of a variety of particularcomponents, many of which also play a role inother four-year programs. But it is the delicateinterrelation and mutual reinforcement of thevarious components in any one four-year programwhich make it into a coherent whole.The following propositions are a general statement of how and why this interrelation and rein-74forcement works and what kinds of componentscan constitute a four-year program. There is anenormous diversity of practices when programsare looked at in detail. One reason for such a general statement is that it will, we hope, allow practices across the College to become more intelligible. In addition, many programs are changing, andreports of details quickly become out-of-date. Butthe changes appear to be a refinement and a continuing exemplification of the kind of practiceswhich this general statement attempts to summarize.A. Sustained work in an area of intellectual activity is considered crucial.B. An area of intellectual activity is primarilydefined by featuring certain problems, materials,and intellectual strategies as central. Such definitions do not imply that these are or can be theexclusive concern of any one program.C. It is thought important that students recognize in a concrete way an area of intellectual activity as an area, one among others. One of thebest ways to accomplish this is by comparison andcontrast with familially related areas.D. This comparison and contrast by familiallyrelated areas usually overlaps to a significant degree with the need to encourage students to beexposed to and explore different areas of intellectual activity and to orient students to University work.E. Different four-year programs are constructedby the different uses of common though flexibleresources.F. Integration is and should be an activity engaged in not only in some special part of the curriculum but throughout a four-year curriculum.G. Each student in the College shapes to somedegree an individual four-year program. Substantial guidance at many stages of a student's careeris consequently a necessary condition of the operation of the "curriculum" we presently have.A. Sustained work in an area of intellectual activity is considered crucial.Faculty think that a sustained experience ofwhat it is to live in an intellectual world should bepart of an undergraduate's educational experience. The claim seems to be that simply talkingabout such experiences is no substitute for someconcrete experience of limited mastery of an areaof intellectual activity. This experience is an opportunity for the recognition of intellectual capacities not easily otherwise obtainable. Furthermore, this experience is normally the result ofsustained work in an area.Many of the areas presented in the form of undergraduate programs are related to areas ofgraduate work. But to say this is in one way to saynothing more than that the College makes someuse of the organizations of intellectual activity already existing in the University.It should be remembered that there are manygraduate departments, committees, institutes,centers, and professional schools at thisUniversity — Astronomy and Astrophysics, Education, Comparative Literature, to name only afew — which resist becoming undergraduate programs because they think significant work in theseareas is best put off until after college work hasbeen completed. Faculty from these areas doteach in the College and are sometimes explicitlyassociated with undergraduate programs. Consequently, the existence of certain types of undergraduate programs is not in some obvious way aresult of an indiscriminate intrusion of graduateprograms into the undergraduate curriculum. Nordoes the absence of others imply in some simpleway a lack of concern for undergraduates by faculty associated with such programs.There are many undergraduate programs whichhave no graduate counterpart. In addition, manyprograms with such a counterpart are carefulabout distinguishing the objectives of their undergraduate and graduate programs. At times, however, this may not be possible. There exist someprograms — for example, those in "exotic" languages and civilizations and Linguistics — in whichit is difficult to distinguish undergraduates fromgraduate students on the master's level. But this isto a large degree a result of most colleges not possessing the resources which this University doesin offering opportunities for serious work in somany areas.It is unclear how much importance should beattached to these different facts. The more important facts seem to be that such sustained workis only one part of a four-year program and that itis bizarre to compare such four-year programs asa whole with graduate programs. A more important question than that about the kinds of relations, if any, between undergraduate and graduateareas is whether an area which claims to be anarea of intellectual activity in this College is in factso conceived and organized to allow for sustainedcoherent work by undergraduates.B. An area of intellectual activity is primarilydefined by featuring certain problems, materials,75and intellectual strategies as central. Such definitions do not imply that these are or can be theexclusive concern of any one program.When these propositions are stated by programfaculty, the term "problems" is usually stressed.This use of "problems" is not meant to reducecommon problems to a particular solution of suchproblems. Nor is it meant to imply the need for orpossibility of "ideological" consensus about thesolution to such problems. Furthermore, facultyrecognize that problems which are featured byany one program can also be the concern of otherswho feature other problems and that variant formulations of the seemingly same problems canlead to different disciplines of inquiry.What this suggests is that if one talks about aprogram simply in terms of material covered, itbecomes difficult to distinguish many programsfrom each other. It appears to be the case, forexample, that part of the shared foundationalunity or family groupings of many programs depends upon a recognition that in some sense thesame material is being scrutinized with differentproblems and questions in mind, the answers towhich are relevant to each other in further workon this material. What is also suggested is that ifone talks about a program simply in terms of theintellectual strategies or techniques engaged in,when these are understood in a general way, itbecomes difficult to distinguish many programsfrom others. To put this another way, the ways inwhich material is concretely used or understoodand the ways in which intellectual strategies ortechniques are concretely engaged in appear to bea result of featuring certain problems which generate these ways as peculiarly relevant to the solution of these problems or questions. One consequence of this is that attempts to talk about curriculum simply in terms of materials covered orsimply in terms of intellectual strategies engagedin lift them out of the functional context whichgives them significance in the first place. Withoutsuch a context, the reason for such intellectualstrategies and techniques, a growth of sophistication in their performance and the compulsion tofollow through with them in a sustained fashion,becomes obscure at best. In addition, withoutsuch a context the potentially plausible reasonsfor the different uses and analyses of the "same"material can easily turn into facile commitmentsto different "perspectives" or generate4 4 academic' ' logomachies .One consequence of this featuring of "problems" is that programs have generated over the last ten years sets of courses which in differentways introduce a student to the fundamental concerns of "concentration" work in a program. Fewconcentrations have what can be thought of as asomewhat complete set of specified courses presented sequentially and taught yearly. In addition,it i& often the case that courses with programlabels other than those of the program itself can beused as fulfilling "concentration" work, and appropriately so in the opinion of the program faculty, given the delicate interrelation amongproblems, materials, and intellectual strategiesmentioned above. Therefore, it becomes extremely important to define relatively early in astudent's career what the fundamental problemsare which constitute work in a program. This provides a criterion of relevance for further work inthe program and a partial basis for the informedchoice by students of the various emphases whichare possible in any one program.It is possible to reformulate what has been saidso far in explaining statement B by talking of"corporate curricular personalities." It is possibleto discern in almost all programs a corporate orcommon mind, relatable in many ways to othercorporate minds. Furthermore, this common mindis discernable in organizational terms within curricular practice and becomes knowable by students, though usually only in stages, from the"personality" expressed organizationally in curricular practice .It is thought that the existence of such a "curricular personality" is a necessary though notsufficient condition of a program being a 4 "field"of undergraduate study. The existence of such acurricular personality is not dependent on the sizeof the program, whether that be computed bycounting faculty or students. The claim, oftenheard in the past, that large programs cannot havesuch personalities, or, if they do, have "rigid"ones, however "rigid" may be defined, is simplynot true. A concern with such personalities is alsoquite relevant to small programs since these mustalso justify their existence in terms of such personalities in order to make clear that the programis not simply a matter of whims of individual faculty. When one reviews present practices, themore definite articulation of such curricular personalities is one very obvious change over the lastten years, if one considers programs in the Collegeas a group. The existence of such a personality ispart of the justification for the existence of anyprogram. Without it, it becomes difficult to seewhat a program can offer to students in compari-76son and contrast to other programs. To say thatsuch a personality is not possible in some field is,we think, to say that the "field" is not really afield, a field of study with characteristic problemswhich are featured organizationally in curricularpractice and which are not dependent on theidiosyncrasies of individual faculty. A studentshould be able to articulate, after completion of aprogram and especially to those not in the field ofwork, what the field is in a way that is not reducible to the influences of individual faculty or theirindividual opinions, whether taken separately or"added together" in bare conjunction. If a supposed field is claimed to be communicable toothers only by individual faculty each of whomgets an opportunity to initiate a student into the"mysteries" of the supposed field, then this is nota field appropriate for undergraduate study.We are not suggesting that the personalities wefound could not or should not change, that theyshould become fixed or frozen in the shape theyhave now. There is more to be done and much thatis being done. Again, constant or quiet change isthe rule in most cases rather than the exception.But we do find impressive that we can discernsuch personalities when perhaps five or ten yearsago we would have discerned quite different onesand at least in some cases none at all.As was said, the existence of such a curricularpersonality is part of the justification for a program being a program in the College, especiallywhen compared to other programs. In addition, itsdetailed articulation allows for and is the determination of a variety of matters such as the ways inwhich it is expected that students will progressthrough the curriculum; the ways in which students are in a position to make informed choices,when appropriate; confidence that the same thingis not being done over again in many courses andthat all students do get exposure to and training infundamental matters; and concrete recognition byfaculty of how they can build upon work alreadydone.Therefore it is possible to become ratherspecific in any one case about what the corporatecurricular personality is. This depends on clarityabout what the possible problems to be featuredare and usually on the existence of "introductory" courses. But it can also, for example, depend, in different programs, upon the existence ofextensive faculty guidance; seminars or workshops which allow students in the program towork together on certain matters in a way not possible in other courses which the program offers, which are either large or in which there are students from many programs; or senior papers, fieldexaminations, or research projects in which thestudent is given an opportunity to exhibit thecapacity for sustained work in one area of intellectual activity. There are some patterns of personalities, some basis for comparison and contrast, but it is difficult to present a detailed patternwhich is or should be the same for all.Another reason for the existence of such definite corporate curricular personalities is contained in the next set of propositionsC. It is thought important that students recognize in a concrete way an area of intellectual activity as an area, one among others. One of thebest ways to accomplish this is by comparison andcontrast with familially related areas.Faculty do not think that sustained work in anyone area of intellectual activity is sufficient. Suchan emphasis would lead most students into a self-defeating provincialism. The term "provincialism" is here used as a label for the claim thatany one area is self-sufficient and necessarily unrelated to other areas. Such provincialism isthought to be self-defeating because it does not dojustice to the facts of present intellectual worlds,to the multiple ways in which work in each areainfluences and reinforces many others. Consequently, faculty consider the recognition in aconcrete way by students that any one area ofintellectual activity is just that, one among many,to be crucial. This is important not only for a proper sense of what the powers and limits of any onearea may be, but also for the somewhat detailedappreciation of a variety of areas of intellectualactivity as facts about how we live intellectually.To recognize that what may seem to be uniquematerials or unique intellectual strategies do haveat least family resemblances to materials andstrategies adjusted to similar or different problemsis to recognize that intellectual life rarelyflourishes in a self-sufficient province and that thisrecognition is itself, paradoxically, usually onlypossible by working in other "provinces."The various types of introductory courseswhich are offered in the College are the normalway by which a student is given an opportunity torecognize these relations among multiple problems, materials, and intellectual strategies, especially when the courses are in familially relatedareas. To say that all or most exposure to differentareas of intellectual activity should be as "remote" as possible from the area in which a student is doing sustained work is not thought to be77satisfactory since the remote would probably remain simply that, remote and different, and notreally function, in the way an experience of thesimilar or familially related can, to encouragescrutiny of a simple commitment to supposedself-sufficiency of an area of intellectual activity,whatever that may be.Such familially related courses are counted officially in many ways. Sometimes they are "core"courses, sometimes electives. (By "core" course,we mean in this report a course designed for the"year in (some) common.") Usually they constitute a substantial part of what is called the secondquartet. There may be complaints at times thatthese various introductory courses are taughtfrom the perspective of a worker in an intellectualvineyard rather than from that of the generallyinterested consumer. This may trouble some,especially students, who may wish to get throughwith this "stuff" insofar as it is seen as a "prerequisite" to what should be the "real" work.Some adjustments are made for this problem.There are often variants of what may seem initially to some to be simply a prerequisite course.Furthermore, individual faculty may have to adjust what they can teach to the degree of sophistication of students from different intellectualbackgrounds, a problem especially prominent in"concentration" courses, whether introductoryor other types of courses, used for different purposes by different students. Yet, it is thought to becrucial that these courses be taught from theperspective of a worker in an intellectual vineyardif they are to encourage a recognition of the different delicate balances among problems, materials,and strategies which faculty think necessary forthe overcoming of provincialism.The sets of propositions labeled B and C consequently reinforce each other. Insistence thatthere be distinctly articulated corporate curricularpersonalities is plausible if recognition of such apersonality as one among many is to be possible.Conversely, insistence that a student be exposedto a variety of areas of intellectual activity, especially to a number of familially related ones, depends on access to distinct areas in a manageableform, normally by way of various sets of introductory courses.This double function of introductory courses ascourses for students who plan to continue work inan area and as courses for those getting exposureto familially related areas does not exhaust themany ways in which any one set of courses canfunction within the curriculum.D. This comparison and contrast by familially78 related areas usually overlaps to a significant degree with the need to encourage students to beexposed to and explore different areas of intellectual activity and to orient students to University work.One of the impressive features of the presentcurriculum is the way in which a variety of purposes can be served by any one course or set ofcourses. To reduce most courses to one purposedoes a serious injustice to the intricate relations ofcourses that can exist within the curriculum. Thefact of such intricate relations is especially important for how students can locate themselves inthe University and begin to shape an undergraduate career on the basis of informed choicesgrounded in a concrete awareness of a range ofopportunities.It is a truism that the College must be sensitiveto the problem of helping a student bridge the gapbetween high school and college. One relevantconsideration, though not the only one, is obviously orientation of the student into the intellectual life of the University. Close contact with faculty and small class size seem to be very important in dealing with many aspects of this problem.But one fact that must be kept in mind whenthinking about matters of orientation is that thereis no one obvious set of courses that a studentmust take in a first year's work. The many courseslabeled "core" are not necessarily the onlycourses which can be or are taken in the first year.Some may be and are taken in later years. A concern with problems of orientation cannot therefore be easily localized in some way in the"core." Consequently, many "introductory"courses, including those normally labeled "core,"can be understood both as providing continuingorientation for students to what it means to doUniversity work and as providing continuing opportunities for exposure to and exploration ofwhat it is possible to work in on a Universitylevel. "Introductory" courses, includingmathematics and elementary language courses,are and must always be sensitive about their roleof orienting students to the possibilities of University work and not merely to their role of introducing students to an area in which students willcontinue to work.There are many courses officially labeled"core" in any one collegiate division. These arevariant ways of satisfying the "core" requirements. In most collegiate divisions, many programs think of a variant of the core as a better"introduction" to their concerns than others.What this seems to mean at times is that eachvariant tends to create a constituency for a program by getting students acquainted with, interested in, and excited about certain possibilitiesof intellectual work. However, if one thinks of thecore variants in this fashion, it is the case that theconcerns of some programs are not obviously represented in the "core." Exposure to and exploration of these other concerns is often encouragedor required as part of the so-called second quartetof a collegiate division. These, however, can normally overlap with the requirements of familiallyrelated courses mentioned above. Some corecourses in a collegiate division may also be understood as more appropriate for those who plan tocontinue to work in the division, while other corecourses are more appropriate for students in othercollegiate divisions. The former group of coursesmay, however, serve a variety of functions, depending upon the ultimate concentration work of astudent. That is, any one such course might becounted as core or as familially related secondquartet or as elective work. Some students,though, may shift their programs rather extensively. It is usually, though not always, possibleto do this without extending or unduly extendingresidence beyond four years. Some courses already taken can be counted as free electives. Inaddition, depending upon how radical the shift is,some or many of the courses already taken may beacceptable in the new program as "second quartet." Furthermore, students can take four ratherthan three courses in the third and fourth years.(The normal expectation is four courses a quarterin the first two years, three courses a quarter inthe final two years. But this limit is exceeded bymany students whatever their program and anextra course per quarter in the last two years doesnot require any extra payment of tuition.)If "core" is understood as including the courseswhich are in fact taken by most students, thenmathematics and elementary language are part ofan extended "core" in this College. Only a fewstudents do not take mathematics courses. Also,all students take elementary language courses orexhibit in one way or another appropriate competence, except for some students in the socialsciences who must take mathematics through calculus level if they do not take languages, all ofwhom, however, take two three-quarter civiliza-tional sequences. (There seems to be no basis atChicago for the lamentations heard at some of itssister institutions about the lack of such extended"core" experiences.) These courses in mathematics and elementary language are often countedofficially as part of the second quartet, sometimes as restricted electives and even in a few cases aspart of the concentration work. The variation inhow the counting occurs exemplifies in part thedifferent functions such courses can serve fordifferent students.Requirements of the so-called ''second quartet" are often talked about officially as extra-departmental or extra-divisional. Given the manytypes of courses offered by each collegiate division, there is normally no problem in having thesame set of courses partially satisfy these requirements as stated, serve as orientation to University work, be opportunities chosen by studentsfor exposure to and exploration of various possible areas of intellectual work, be familially relatedto work in whatever becomes the area of "concentration," and satisfy what may be thought ofas prerequisites to work in any one concentration.Core requirements, whether in the official senseor in the extended sense talked about above, second quartet requirements, and even elective requirements are so written and interpreted by thedifferent collegiate divisions to allow for any onecourse which is ultimately counted toward one ofthese "requirements" to serve a variety of purposes for different students and for any one student. Another way to state this is that manycourses in the College, taken individually, are expected to serve a variety of purposes for differentstudents and any one student. The existence ofsuch multiple-purpose courses is part of the reason why the organization of different programsout of the same "resources" is possible. Stillanother way to state this is that any one programor group of programs in the College provides opportunities not merely for students in a particularprogram, but also for many other students. The"services" of a program are rarely exhausted bylooking at what it does for its "own." The presentcurriculum works only because of extensive"mutual aid" at many levels among programs.This aid is not merely a matter of using coursesfrom other areas. It also includes the generation ofnew courses by faculty and the willingness of faculty to become involved as associated faculty inthe work of programs other than their "primary"one. This aid is a concrete exemplification by faculty of the need to recognize and live with theinterdependence and mutual reinforcement of anyone area of intellectual activity by others. Thepropositions labeled C are not merely somethingpreached, but also are practiced, by the faculty. Itis possible, however, to extend what has been saidso far about the resources which make possiblethe functioning of any one four-year program.79E. Different four-year programs are constitutedby the different uses of common though flexiblecurricular resources.The flexible use of individual courses and sequences of courses, especially though not exclusively the various "introductory" courses, including core courses, is of course crucial. But therange of curricular resources drawn on by different programs to serve different purposes is muchwider than what is considered "normal" coursework. Without such a use of flexible resources,current four-year programs would be very different from what they are now and probably not beable to give any organizational existence to thegeneral propositions stated earlier in this section.These other resources range from quarterly lecture series specially designed for undergraduates,seminars, workshops, clubs, tutorials, individualresearch, junior and senior papers, and comprehensive examinations, through faculty advising, course "staffs," and departmental curriculumcommittees, to other more "physical" resourcessuch as program lounges and availability of librarymaterial or research facilities. This list is notmeant to be exhaustive. Rather it is meant tosuggest the range of what it is necessary to consider as curricular resources out of which programs have been constructed. What is particularlyinteresting is the imaginative use of such resources to serve different purposes in differentprograms and to reflect the different kinds of unityor coherence thought appropriate as a basis forundergraduate education. In addition, it is thisimaginative use of such curricular resources whichhas constituted much of the many substantial andcarefully conceived curricular changes and of themany "fine-tuning" efforts which have occurredin the last ten, and especially the last five, years.One reason for our use of "curricular practice" inthis report is that the phrase is appropriately ambiguous about the range of curricular resourcesand reflects the need to consider many kinds ofactivities if justice is to be done to the present"curriculum."F. Integration is and should be an activity engaged in not only in some special part of the curriculum but throughout a four- year curriculum.We think that all that has been said so far exemplifies the central importance of integration. Integration is made possible by the whole "curriculum" and the kind of "curricular practices"we do have. To have the flexible, delicately balanced organizations of intellectual work as four-year programs of study is to have opportunities for continuing and diverse "integrating experiences." Integration, in principle, should be possible by means of any "course" or appropriatelyrelated set of "courses." These should, in principle, reflect the organized four-year programs inwhich they function as components and allow forreflection on them. Put another way, integrationought to be and is, as far as we can tell, to asubstantial degree, a matter of day-to-day expectations and practice.The tendency of some to solve general problems by offering a course "in it" — general problems such as "integration" or "writing well" or"reading well" or "thinking well" — seems tomiss the point of the problem. This is not to saythat any number of courses which are meant to be"integrating or culminating experiences" are notappropriate in a specific context and for somespecific purposes. There are many such coursesand they seem to provide a valuable service. Certain courses, given the organization of a specificprogram, are appropriately adjusted to bringingtogether what may be dispersed into certain"parts" of that program. But such courses are notmeant to be a substitute for an awareness of andreflection on a four-year program of study. Furthermore, reflection has to be about something. Inthe four-year programs of study as we have talkedabout them, it would seem that reflection is aboutthe interrelation, mutual reinforcement, andproportions of the particular somethings whichare the "matter" that we, students and faculty,are directly engaged with on a day-to-day basis.Reflection and integration is not something separate from such matter, but a better appreciation ofits significance, variability, and incompleteness.Faculty do recognize that some courses offerbetter opportunities for and better encourage suchreflection and integration as habits of mind. Thishas to do with such things as the kinds of expectations faculty and students have about their material, expectations which are created and expressed, for example, in the kinds of questions thoughtplausible or open for discussion in any particularcourse or the kinds of examinations which aremeant to "test" what has been achieved in a particular course. We are not talking about ramblingdiscussions or examinations which test everything. Questions and examinations ought to ariseout of and be limited by the type of particularengagements which are possible with this or thatmaterial. But we are all limited to a greater orlesser degree in such matters. To put this morepositively, anyone working seriously in an area80has developed an "intellectual style," a particularway of living and working in an intellectual world.It is partly because of this that it is so important tohave and emphasize the organization of four-yearprograms, the organizational expression of corporate personalities, and the organizationally required experience of a variety of areas of intellectual activity.Yet all this talk should not suggest that these"organizations" do, can, or should exist in abloodless way. To see people really living andworking in an area of intellectual activity, eachwith their own "intellectual style," is itself an important part of the educational process. If nothingelse, it shows that it can be done and is done, thatit is possible to live one's own life with "style,"that the organization is the occasion of and opportunity for coming to discover one's own "urbane" style.One way to illustrate these matters is to suggestthat "integrating" discussions made up, forexample, of people on the basis of different "ist"labels (economist, sociologist, political scientist)both do and do not make sense. They make senseinsofar as the different individuals are thought tobring to the discussion an ability to deal withcharacteristic and relatively distinct problems.But this rests on the assumption that commonground can be found or is obvious, or that different concerns can be easily related to each other.But different people, some more "urbane" or lessprovincial than others, are better able to carry onand contribute in a significant way to such discussions. People from the same "province" are notinterchangeable, and part of what a student has torecognize, in a concrete way, about the relativeabsence of provincialism is the impossibility insuch circumstances of literal interchangeability ofpeople who live in the "same" intellectual world.To sum up these last remarks, the opportunitieswe seem to offer most emphatically to studentsare collegial, not individual. These collegial opportunities are the four-year programs of study.We do this in order that students become individuals, not a poor imitation of any one of us. Butto say this is to say that the organization of curriculum is a way of providing varied and flexibleopportunities for students to learn what it is to livein and integrate in their own way intellectualworlds which others, including, but not exclusively, university faculty, also live in and with.This can be stated in another way and generalized.G. Each student in the College shapes to somedegree an individual four-year program. Substan tial guidance at many stages of a student's careeris consequently a necessary condition of the operation of the "curriculum" we presently have.The general statement of curricular practices upto this point should have made clear that thisshaping by students, this active participation bystudents in the determination of an individual program, is not meant to result in a provincial or random dabbling or self-indulgence, or that it is aconsequence of a general "elective" system orvague "distribution" requirements which permitor encourage such dabbling or self-indulgence.But the organization of four-year programs, individually and collectively, is meant to be flexibleenough to allow for the use, extension, or furtherfocusing of the experience and interest a studentalready has, to allow for appropriate explorationand exposure to a variety of areas of intellectualactivity, and to allow for, when appropriate,different emphases by students in any one area ofintellectual activity. This flexibility is one reasonwhy it is difficult to state, except in general terms,what common curricular practices are. Yet if thisflexibility is to be made use of in appropriateways, it does depend on students making informed choices. College advisers and, to an increasing degree, faculty advisers in individualprograms must obviously play important roles inthe process. In addition, accurate information inthe form of College announcements and generalcounseling sessions is also important. But thisprocess also depends on the wide range of "introductory" courses which have as one of theirfunctions the provision of concrete informationabout possible areas of intellectual activity.Section IVCurrent curricular practices as presented in thepreceding section are, we think, a fulfillment ofthe hopes of the Levi Memorandum of 1964 and ofthe report of the 1966 curriculum committeewhich suggested, after extensive College-wide discussion, how this memorandum should be implemented. The main hope seems to have been togenerate coherent and interrelated four-year programs rather than to continue with a curriculumconstituted by at best the bare conjunction ofseparate parts, each part being a separate territorywith its own self-sufficient rationale. The term"four-year" is often used in both documents. Butit is used not to state a fact, but to articulate a goalto be achieved. The institutional strategysuggested to achieve this was the creation of distinct collegiate divisions with appropriate responsibilities.81Both documents talk of a "year in (some) common." It was expected that different patterns of"year in (some) common" courses and othercourses would be appropriate for different first-year students. It was also expected that foreignlanguages would play a role in all programs andmathematics in many or most programs.Moreover, both documents assume that part ofthe undergraduate experience will involve "mastery of a field of knowledge" and that such fieldswill to a substantial degree use the resources anddemarcations of "fields of knowledge" alreadyrepresented in the University, that ". .. universities must work with the materials at hand."Furthermore, to continue using the LeviMemorandum, it was expected that ". . .in connection with the mastery of a field of knowledge. . . the student can be lead to a better understanding of the ways of thought and of the limitsand interrelationships among various disciplines"and it was assumed that "in a community whereeveryone is on his way to becoming a specialist. . . the need to understand the interrelationshipsamong fields of knowledge and to appreciate thecompetition among and limitations upon the disciplines is all the more important, and in part sothat one's own discipline may be understood."Furthermore, both documents assume that experiments within existing programs and experiments with new programs would occur.All these expectations and assumptions arecentral to present practices and are now facts ofpresent curricular practice.As we stated in the preceding section, part ofwhat is important about the programs of study isthat they provide opportunities for sustained workin a field of intellectual activity. We say in ourpublic literature that Chicago has been and is aresearch university. The organization of programsseems to be an expression of this commitment,talked about publicly only in a general way, to anexperience of what it is to be a worker in variousintellectual vineyards, rather than to consumptionof what has already been searched out and harvested. But it seems to be agreed that this work ofsearching is only possible in a research university,that is, in a context in which provincialism isthought to be ultimately an obstacle to sustainedsearching and to an appreciation of what has beenfound.Furthermore, not only are there many programsof study. These programs are constantly changing, and this fact is more importantthan the namea program of study may have at any one time. Wesay in our public literature that the College has been and is an experimental laboratory of education. The carefully conceived changes expressedin flexible, delicately balanced organizations ofintellectual work seem to be the continuing experiments we talk about publicly only in a generalway. These experiments seem to be, in fact,carefully gontrolled by being carried on in organized ways which are an expression of "corporate curricular personalities." In addition, theyare university experiments aware, respectful of,and intimately connected with other organizedexperiments. The awareness, respect, and interrelation are expressed in the kinds of organizationany experiment must have in order to be considered a useful one that will, at the minimum, not doharm to those involved in it.Moreover, a fact usually neglected in our publicliterature, these organized experiments andsearchings continue to provide models for others,models -which appear to influence not merely organizations of undergraduate work in other institutions, but also what it is to be a field of intellectual work, no matter what the specific institutional context in which it is carried on.The Levi Memorandum in particular was concerned that "departments vary greatly in their assumption of responsibility for undergraduate instruction" (and it talked about such responsibilityprimarily in terms of the provision of courses) andthat departments tended to think of themselves asself-sufficient organizations. It may be useful atthis point to list some "trends" which have become apparent over the last ten years, whichtrends are not particularly featured in the detailedillustrations of this report. This should not suggestthat they are unimportant. They are crucial to theoperation of present curricular practices. Thesetrends are a matter of degree in two senses. Theyare not present everywhere, and it is unclearwhether they are in fact universally appropriate.Secondly, the facts we talk about have been present in some programs for a long time. It is theirgrowth in the College as a whole that we wish tostress. ^There is a much greater sense of departmentalresponsibility for the College as a whole and forthe coherence of a four-year course of study thanthere was ten years ago. There are more departmental curriculum committees which attemptto insure that appropriate courses are offered eachyear and that courses are projected for at least thefollowing two years. Furthermore, there are fewerdepartments which think that teaching undergraduates is the main or sole responsibility of"junior" faculty. There is a greater use of semi-82nars, workshops, tutorials, and individual research to insure that students in a program receiveclose attention and have an opportunity for a certain type of work not otherwise available. Thesame may be said of junior and senior papers.There is a greater willingness to "serve" studentsin other programs, to use courses from other programs in one's own program, and to have facultyfrom various programs explicitly "associated"with any one program, all of which seems to be apartial manifestation of greater awareness of familial relationships among various programs.There is an increased demand by faculty advisersthat students meet with them before registration,and often each quarter, to try to insure thatappropriate choices are being made and tomonitor a student's progress.In sum, present practices in general appear tobe concrete realizations of the assumptions andexpectations expressed in these two documents.Furthermore, there seems to have been substantial movement away from what were consideredparticularly unattractive features of some of thecurricular practices which existed some ten yearsago.Section VWe think it useful to provide some relatively detailed illustration of the varied ways "corporatecurricular personalities" organize themselves.The details of this organization could be presentedin many ways. We choose to feature as a centraldevice in our presentation what are called "introductory," "survey," or "foundational" courses.These are the places where a student begins work.But what is interesting is not merely the diversityof types of such courses, but also the diversity ofwhat occurs in different programs which seem tohave introductory, survey, or foundationalcourses of the same type after such courses aretaken. In fact, it is difficult to summarize thedifferent senses of "introduction," "survey," or"foundation" which we have uncovered becauseto clarify the meanings of such terms it is necessary to present in some detail how individualprograms are organized. We hope that the following examples provide a representative "survey." Another reason we have chosen to featuresuch courses is that our presentation so far hassuggested that they play many roles and serve avariety of purposes. For example, they could be"core" courses in some cases. Many of what arecounted as "second quartet" and "elective"courses are these courses. Consequently, afurther inspection of how they function in "con centrations" would be, we think, useful. Byfeaturing this "curricular resource," we do notmean to suggest that others are unimportant. Thisis simply one way to present, in some detail, illustrations of some of the organizations aboutwhich we have been talking.We begin our illustrations with the History program. The introductory courses in this programare a variety of surveys in the form of three-quarter sequences. In large part, the multiplicity isdetermined by spatial and temporal distinctions,though other organizations, such as history of science, are represented. These courses cover a vastrange since they include the various "non-Western" civilization courses. All the standardsurveys attempt to consider political, economic,social, and intellectual themes and problems, butdo so in different proportions. These differencesare in part a result of how various historians conceive these areas of study and also of what opportunities for further work exist at this University. All these courses are meant to be broad surveys taught primarily by means of secondarymaterial which acquaint the student not merelywith a range of problems but also fundamentaldata. Acquaintance with data in the form of organized facts is thought to be necessary notmerely because it provides a foundation forfurther work, but also because most contemporary students are simply unaware of such data. It isargued that introductory surveys which deal simply with general "fundamental" issues or withhistoriographical problems would not be adequatesince they would be operating in what would befor most students a factual vacuum.Almost all these courses are taught every year.The quarter courses of a sequence are normallytaught by different faculty and a faculty memberwho does teach in the sequence normally teachesin it once every two or three years. Coherenceover the three quarters and some kind of uniformity from year to year are achieved by informaldiscussions among this "staff." These staffs,however, are in large part the faculty who teachadditional "upper-level" courses in the area.They are consequently aware in concrete terms ofwhat can be built on in upper level courses sincethey are also responsible for an adequate span ofsuch courses being offered in the area. Furthermore, both "junior" and "senior" faculty regularly teach all such courses and make up the"staff " of the introductory surveys.Most faculty on such staffs are members of theHistory Department. However, other faculty,usually those primarily associated with the vari-83ous civilization programs, regularly teach in theintroductory surveys, and informal relationshipshave been built up which do not merely allow andencourage faculty primarily associated with oneprogram to teach in another but also provide staffsout of which are generated additional courses inother programs which are acceptable to bothprograms. Consequently, "upper-level" courseswithout a History label are accepted as courses inthe History program and vice versa. The fact ofacceptance is important. But equally important isthe detailed awareness by faculty advisers in theseprograms of what occurs in various courses. Thispermits better guidance of students' programs. InHistory, there are multiple faculty advisers forvarious areas of study. Responsibility for guidance of students is not placed on one person inthis large program and more attention is consequently given to individual students. These advisers are part of the departmental curriculumcommittee which has as subcommittees the various area staffs mentioned earlier. This overlapping insures that appropriate courses are taughtand that knowledge of the detailed workings of acourse are shared by many, including the multiplefaculty advisers.These introductory surveys are taken by manystudents, a majority of whom are not History"majors." Students in other concentrations canuse such courses to attain a general backgroundwhich can put more detailed work into certainproblems in a broader perspective and to achievea better sense of proportion about problemssometimes treated in a relatively ahistorical fashion. One illustration of this is the American history sequence which can be used in this way bystudents in, for example, Political Science, PERL,or Public Affairs. All students in History also takethe History of Western Civilization sequence. Themultiple variants of this course tend to use more"primary material" than the other "introductions" and, because of smaller class size in anyone section, allow faculty to devote more time tostudent writing. In addition, most students in History are in the social science variant of the program which requires two civilization courses.Consequently, this package of multiple "introductory" courses attempts to insure that a studentwill not fall into literal provincialism and gives thestudent in History a better sense of proportionabout his or her area of further study. In addition,the requirements of "upper-level" courses inHistory fall into what is effectively a "major" and"minor," these being in different "provinces."Therefore the organization of a program of work, taking as a whole some "second-quartet" and allthe "concentration" requirements, is adjusted toovercoming a literal problem of provincialism.Yet the History program thinks all this is insufficient for a student in the program. The stresson organized data from secondary sources in mostintroductory surveys is not considered to be asubstitute for experience in guided research intoprimary sources (of which Regenstein has a copious supply) and historiographical reflection.Large classes do not allow History majors to get toknow one another and work together and also donot permit controlled guidance of extensive practice in historical writing. Consequently a numberof workshops or seminars which do provide opportunities for such experiences have been instituted. One seminar, variants of which are giveneach quarter, is required of juniors, and two seminars, which result in an extended "senior paper,"are required of seniors. This policy is a deliberateone and an explicit response to the lack of certainimportant opportunities in other courses. Its consequences are three fewer "normal" Historycourses in a student's program and the expenditure of substantial faculty energy. Yet the program considers such a "price" a plausible one ifall students in History are to be provided with asignificant undergraduate education.The various civilization programs, Far Eastern,South Asian, Near Eastern, and Russian, can beseen as variants of this pattern. The introductorycourses are the same as the sequences used byhistory (except for some of the introductory sequences offered by Near Eastern), though it ispossible to argue that more reflection on historiographical matters is present in these sequencesand necessarily so because of their "exotic"character for Western students. This is perhapsmost obvious in the new Far Eastern sequence. Inaddition, one and normally two years of an exoticlanguage are required by these programs and thereis more of an opportunity to focus on imaginativeliterature in some courses in the program. There isnot an extensive system of multiple faculty advisers, curriculum committees, or seminars in partbecause the programs are small and classes aresmall. More intimate contact with students in individual classes, better supervision pf a student'swork, including writing, and more extensive useof primary sources in most courses, a requirementbased in part on the lack of extended secondarymaterial, is consequently possible. It seems to beadmitted by those involved with History and thecivilizational programs that the primary differences between a History ' 'track' ' and a civilization84program "track," when these programs arelooked at as four-year courses of study, are therequirement of an exotic language, the opportunities this requirement creates, and a greater,though still limited, emphasis on imaginative literature. In addition, the civilization programs havefaculty associated with them from many otherprograms. Consequently, the programs can beseen as providing students who have somewhatspecial interests access to a wide range of University faculty. It should be remembered that each ofthese programs graduates not more than threestudents a year. But part of the utility of the existence of such programs, when looked at from aUniversity standpoint and combined undergraduate and graduate programs, may be to provide a place where faculty with shared concernsmay come together in a relatively organized way.However, other programs, small in comparisonto History, also seem to be variants of the Historypattern and have more explicit requirements anddevices, similar to those of History, than the civili-zational programs. Slavic is one example. It has atwo-quarter broad historical survey of Russian literature which provides, a base for further detailedwork. The senior tutorial attempts to bring together both the language and literature sides of theprogram by having a student do research in Russian into some primary material which results in apaper written in Russian. Thus skill in literaryanalysis and in the language is "tested" andrefined by the senior tutorial. Still another example is Romance. This has three tracks or "concentrations": French, Italian, Spanish. Each has athree-quarter broad historical survey of the literature which is simultaneously an introduction toproblems of literary analysis appropriate to thefield. The prerequisite for these courses is twoyears of the "relevant" elementary language.Further courses on individual authors are thenavailable. But the program concludes with athree-quarter tutorial, taken by all seniors together, which is a refinement of the skills of textual explication, speaking and aural comprehension, and general writing ability and results eitherin a comprehensive exam or a senior paper. Theseprograms may graduate a few more students ayear than the civilization programs, but they havemore explicit curricular devices — tutorials,exams, or a B.A. paper — built into the program.Yet it may be argued that the use of such devicesis possible for such programs as Slavic and Romance because they confine themselves to imaginative literature, while the civilization programspermit greater variation. That is, an individual student in the civilization programs is expectedto explore in detail a few aspects of a civilization, requiring multiple modes of analysis, oneof which may be imaginative literature and appropriate literary criticism. In addition, such programs as Slavic and Romance are able to havestudents achieve in a four-year program a muchgreater degree of linguistic competence than theprograms based on the so-called "exotic" languages. Consequently the linguistic aspects cannot figure so prominently in what it is to be astudent in one of the civilization programs.It is important to mention that in all these programs the "department" as a whole is responsiblefor assuring that appropriate courses are taughtand that both "junior" and "senior" faculty teachat all or most levels. In addition, there is continuous faculty advising and monitoring of a student'swork.All the programs mentioned so far have specificintroductory courses which do not admit of variants. In addition, they attempt to introduce a student simultaneously to the problems of the areaand to large amounts of data, organized facts, presented historically.The introductory surveys in most other programs are presented in an ahistorical fashion.Biology is an interesting case to begin with sincethe program is co-extensive with an entire collegiate division. There are three types of "unifiedfoundation" by means of which a student organizes his or her work. Furthermore there aremultiple variants of an "area" or "issue" which astudent can take. The interaction of these multiple"unified foundations" with multiple variantcourses is interesting in the ways it does not leadto random collections of courses. The first type isthe "core" course, a three-quarter sequencemeant to exemplify the CORE ideas of Continuity, Organization, Regulation, and Evolution.These ideas provide the basis of a thematic continuity in all further work in biology. In addition,these ideas may be exemplified in diverse material In fact it is argued that it is such CORE ideas,the general issues and problems associated withsuch ideas, and the various interactions amongthem which give coherence to present work inbiology. If these are not featured, the field mightappear to be a multiplicity of special studies eachclaiming to be central. Furthermore it is throughsuch ideas as specific hypotheses that current research becomes possible and intelligible. In addition, to feature one theme, idea, or issue to theexclusion of the rest would do an injustice to thefact that each mutually defines the others in any85particular field of work when that is carried out ina sustained fashion. These ideas are, however, notpresented in a general way. They are exemplifiedin the various particular problems, materials, andmodes of analysis which make up the variantsequences of the "core" courses. It is argued thatthey cannot be presented in a vacuum. But thepoint of these particularities is that they are toillustrate the CORE ideas. It is true that a studentmay be more interested in one rather than anothergrouping of particularities and may continue tofeature such an interest in his or her career inbiology. But care is taken not to have the particular groupings be obviously relatable to howfurther work in biology is carried on. In addition,attention has been given, and even more care hasbeen taken recently, to insure that there is continuity and coherence among the three quarterswhich make up any one variant sequence. Thesecond type of "unified foundation" is more of asurvey in greater detail of possible problem areas.At this second level of work in biology, studentshave normally taken the array of chemistry,physics, and mathematics courses which providea base for further work. Part of what the corecourses in biology do is provide appropriate aspects of such other sciences as are necessary todeal with the particular matters at hand. However, at the second level, there is the possibility offurther sophisticated work. A student must takeone course from each of five areas, areas intermediate between the CORE ideas and the normal"departmental" organization of work. The pointappears to be that a selection of five courses willfurther^exemplify the CORE ideas in greater detail. But in addition the variants can be so combined to be closer to the "departmental" lines ofresearch organized around specific ideas andproblems, materials and modes of analysis whichremain somewhat the same but are further refinedin additional work in the area. In order to allow forplausible choices along these lines, thirteen faculty advisers from various areas are available totalk with students about how best to organize theirwork. Yet there is still enough flexibility at thissecond level that a "wrong" choice, in the senseof the choice of a course which may turn out, afterfurther work, to be somewhat inappropriate, doesnot create obstacles to what a student now wishesto feature. The work described so far is sufficientfor a degree in biology. However many studentscontinue with biological work by doing supervisedresearch into many areas. This is the third type of"unified foundation" and tends to be work organized around the more normal "departmental" lines of research in which specific ideas and problems, materials and modes of analysis define whatis central to each department and are refined bysomewhat detailed further work. Supervisors forsuch work seem to be readily available. Researchdoes not necessarily mean laboratory research,though if it does, a research seminar is providedfor sucf? students . If the paper which results fromsuch work is thought potentially worthy of specialhonors, it must be defended before an examiningcommittee. ,This entire operation is run by the master andgoverning committee and its separate subcommittees which concern themselves with curriculum, placement examinations, teaching evaluation, and research and honors. A peculiarity ofthis collegiate division is that most of the teachingis done by "senior" faculty. Most "junior" faculty are asked to postpone such pleasures.What may appear to be simply vague ideas orissues or separate and random variants turn out tobe carefully controlled in various ways andexemplify different concrete kinds of "unity" appropriate at various stages of work with the latterunities building on and extending the earlier.Many introductory courses in other programscan be understood as variations on one of thethree kinds of "unified foundation" found in thebiology program. (In addition, still other programscan be understood as variant combinations ofthese three, some to the extent that a program as awhole might be said to be a variant of the entirebiology pattern.) All these courses provide a basicvocabulary by means of which characteristicproblems, materials, and modes of analysis become intelligible. The differences among them become clearer when the further work they makepossible is considered. In the first type, the introductory courses offer a general awareness of alimited range of problems, materials, and modesof analysis which provide thematic continuity infurther work organized in large part on principlesother than those of the introductory courses. Theproblems and modes of analysis are not meant tobe an exhaustive survey of possibilities and can beillustrated by various material. In the second type,the introductory courses are meant to be a relatively exhaustive survey in some detail of the multiple problems, material, and modes of analysiswhich it is possible to work on in the undergraduate program, and further work turns on aselection of and further inquiry into some subsetof these problems. The "function of these introductory courses is to provide a basis of choice forfurther work against a background of awareness86of something like a full range of fundamentalproblems, materials, and modes of analysis whichcan be worked on in the program. In the thirdtype, the introductory courses present the especially fundamental problems, materials, andmodes of analysis andfurther work is a refinementof these fundamental matters and a use of them tomake various areas of "application' intelligible.These are rough groupings. But if allowance ismade for some stretching on a Procrustean bed,some idea of various types of organizational unitymay be conveyed.Somewhat pure examples of the first type arethe introductory courses offered by Germanic,Geography, General Studies in the Humanities,Medieval Studies, and Religion and theHumanities. The introductory courses in the lasttwo are not specific courses with uniform contentfrom year to year. Rather various specificcourses, given by different faculty, are generatedto illustrate the same range of general issues. Thecontrol on the same range being illustrated isachieved by discussion among faculty intimatelyassociated with the program and other "staff."The introductory courses in the other programsare specific, relatively uniform courses.Yet once this is said, it is important to recognizethe diversity of what occurs after the different initial surveys. Germanic has an introductorycourse, which can be taken only after the first twoyears of "elementary" language, which is an introduction to Literaturwissenschaft . This "studyof literature" means that individual texts are seenas instances of "movements" and "movements"are what they are because of what is done in individual paradigmatic works. The student is then ina position to take courses in individual texts andmovements which cover the historical span ofGerman imaginative literature. The comprehensive examination offers an opportunity to bringtogether texts from various historical periods and"tests" the capacity to exhibit Literaturwissenschaft in detail. The "concentration" work asa whole is organized "historically," but the "introduction" is meant to provide an awareness ofproblems and modes of analysis which are thenexemplified and specified in different ways infurther courses. It is not so much that the problems and modes of analysis are "applied" infurther courses as that they allow for a continuitythrough diverse historical material, which "survey" of material is also an organizing principle ofwork in the concentration and tested in detail incomprehensive examinations.Geography has a number of introductory courses which present fundamental issues andmodes of analysis. These are literally generalprinciples of "location" which are exemplified indifferent ways in the various "tracks" — urban,environmental, regional, and behavioralstudies — one of which is used by a student tofocus his or her further work, work which is monitored by a faculty adviser. Students are thenbrought together in a senior seminar to reflectonce again on fundamental issues and a senioressay arises out of both previous work in one ofthe "tracks" and this senior seminar. GeneralStudies has a three-quarter introductory course incriticism, though it is possible to substitute asimilar sequence when appropriate. The problemsand modes of analysis discussed in these coursesare meant to orient further work in the concentration organized around a number of course clusters. Each student has three interrelated but distinct clusters. There is no a priori limit on what acluster may be, but for most students the clusterstend to feature a selection from the eight or nine"normal" clusters listed in the announcements. Astudent must make application to enter the program and is assigned a faculty adviser when accepted (there being many faculty who serve assuch advisers). In addition, a student is expectedto see both his or her college adviser (who worksvery closely with the program faculty) and facultyadviser at least twice a quarter to report on progress and difficulties and to provide justification ofwhat they are about at any one time. The programresults in an extended bachelor's paper which ismeant to exemplify the individual student's workin the interrelated clusters which make up such astudent's particular program. Religion and theHumanities and Medieval Studies are organized inpatterns somewhat similar to those of these twoprograms.Somewhat pure examples of the second type of"unified foundation" are Linguistics and Sociology. In each program the introductory courses aremeant to survey the multiple problems, kinds ofmaterial, and modes of analysis of the field insome detail. Students are then in a better positionto choose to feature some of these in further workand realize the interconnection of what they areconcerned with with what occurs in the field as awhole. Much turns on these surveys which arespecific, relatively uniform courses and are theprimary way in which a sense of proportion aboutindividual further work is maintained. But theseprograms also use other devices to achieve thesame purposes. For example, Linguistics is oneprogram with a passionate commitment to a87lounge as a focus of its work and impact. Thelounge functions as a sort of clearinghouse andplace of continuing discussion for both studentsand faculty interested in matters linguistic. Consequently both faculty and students who might belocated officially somewhere else — Anthropology,Philosophy, Behavioral Sciences, and various language departments including English — can and douse this "location" as a place to pool resourcesand explore interests.Somewhat pure examples of the third type areEconomics and Public Affairs. Economics has anextended sequence of introductory coursesjwhichprovides a kind of core of fundamental problems,kinds of material, and modes of analysis. Illustrations of "applications" are^iven in these courses,but further courses seem to be either a refinementof the "tools of analysis" or experience in "applications" which make intelligible various types ofeconomic behavior: Public Affairs has a specialthree-quarter sequence which attempts to clarifythe use of political science, economics, andsociology in the articulation and solution of policyquestions and a requirement of explicit courses ineconomic analysis. These courses may use different illustrations from year to year and may betaught by different faculty, but the same kinds ofproblems and modes of analysis are meant to berepresented each year. In addition, a course indata analysis is required. The student can thenfocus on a research problem. Students do this bytaking, in their junior year, a two-quarter "research field problem" seminar. Students agree ona topic of mutual concern as interesting in its ownright. But the topic also provides an opportunityfor explicit "application" of what was done in theintroductory courses. Other courses which helpwith this work are then taken. In the senior year,more "individualized" research work is possible.This results in a senior paper, and such work isrequired to be different from the research projectworked on in the junior year research seminar. Anot unimportant basis for work in Sociology,Economics, and Public Affairs (and also Behavioral Sciences, to be discussed below) is mathematics at least through calculus level which iseither required or "strongly suggested." In addition, Linguistics, Sociology, and Public Affairs allow for the use of courses with other "labels" asconcentration courses in the program. Such use iscontrolled in part by faculty advising, but it is alsocontrolled by the "introductory" sequences whichprovide students with a basis for sensible use ofother courses from the perspective of the majorconcerns of the program. Still other programs can be understood as combinations of these various types. For example,Behavioral Sciences has two introductory coursesof the first type. But then there is a second tier ofrequirements which state that a student must takeone course from each of five areas. These coursesare meant to exemplify the basic issues and modesof analysis presented in the basic introductorycourses. But the span of five courses is also meantto acquaint the student with the broad range ofspecific possible problems, material, and modes ofanalysis. This stage consequently functions likethe second type. Variant courses under each typeare provided, but coherence among the five isachieved by guidance provided by five faculty advisers representing each of the areas. Only afterthese courses are taken is a student thought to bein a position to choose specific areas of furtherconcentrated work. PERL has a substantial set ofintroductory courses: three in law, three in political institutions, three in practical discourse, andtwo in economic analysis. When each group isviewed alone it appears to be closer to the firsttype. In combination, though, they function morelike the second type. Once this work has beendone, a better focus on a specific project becomespossible. Work on the project or projects is filledout by other specific courses drawn from the University as a whole insofar as they are relevant tothe project of an individual student, by extendedindependent study with a tutor or tutors, and by aworkshop attended by all third- and fourth-yearstudents. This specific work results in a juniorpaper and a senior paper read by both the "tutor"and at least one other faculty member. If this workis to be given special honors, it must be acceptedas work of high quality by at least a third facultymember chosen by the master. Both of theseprograms, when looked at as a whole, can be seenas variants of the Biology pattern.Still other variations exist. For example, Musichas an introductory course which covers problems of "listening" and provides elementary exposure to various modes of analysis, such as harmony. But in addition, the Music program offers abroad, three-quarter historical survey of music.These two types of course, together with someothers, provide a foundation for work in furthercourses, which is rounded off by a senior seminar.Geophysical sciences has a three-quarter introductory course. It is meant in part to be a surveyof the second type and a basis for work in one offour tracks around which a student can organizefurther work. But, in addition, it is also meant topresent a unified picture of the earth as seen by88modern methods of inquiry. It can present thispicture in some detail and at a fairly sophisticatedlevel because it can build on the foundation ofother sciences and mathematics which are in effect prerequisites to or taken concurrently withthis course. Consequently the organization of thecourse involves a concern with a "unified picture" which is not necessarily simply the multiplicity of problems and modes of analysis workedon in further courses. In addition, it provides abasis for a "generalise track of work in thegeophysical sciences. (Geophysical Sciences hasbeen publishing for some years what is in effect abook of some 100 pages, revised every two years,which presents the -history of the department,both past and current areas of faculty research,and detailed descriptions, for all courses whichwill be taught in the next two years, of both classand laboratory topics for each course, textbooksto be used, etc. This may indeed be an ideal towhich we might all aspire in whatever appropriatevariant form.)The introductory three-quarter sequence inPhysics covers a wide range of topics. There arethree such sequences taught at different levels ofsophistication to accomodate the different levelsof previous experience which students have ofphysics and different uses to which such a surveycan be put by students not in the Physics program.Many of these topics are further refined in some"intermediate" sequences. As such, these introductory courses may be seen as close to the thirdtype of "unified foundation," and the intermediate ones as a refinement of what is done inthe initial introductory course. Yet all thesecourses in combination can also be seen as providing a foundation for the four-quarter sequencein the structure of matter which the departmentoffers as an introduction to what is fundamental incontemporary research. Consequently, there arevarious sets of courses which deal with topicswhich could be considered fundamental in theirown right. However, some of these courses can beunderstood as providing a foundation for a furtherfoundation, not understandable without the first"foundation" work, but also diffferent in kindfrom it in the sense that the second "foundation"is not simply a further refinement of it. The program in physics does not have explicit requirements about research, but it is expected that moststudents will attach themselves to faculty carryingout research. This expectation is given organizational recognition through "work in research"courses for which students may register. Whatmay look "extra-curricular" is in fact an integral part of the appropriate undergraduate experiencein this program.Mathematics presents a somewhat differentsituation. The calculus sequence is understood tobe fundamental. This is taught at different levelsof sophistication. Majors take a sequence in whichmore rigorous proofs and a greater theoretical development are emphasized. Consequently, forstudents in the program, it is simultaneously anintroduction to a certain range of problems andmodes of analysis and an introduction to moretheoretical mathematical concerns. Students thentake a three-quarter sequence in analysis whichcan in part be understood as a refinement and extension of what occurs in the calculus sequence.After this sequence, the student has the option ofa program in applied mathematics which continues with sustained work in ordinary and partialdifferential equations or a program in "pure"mathematics which requires work in algebra.Other courses may be added depending upon theextent to which the student wishes to exploreother areas of mathematical work. But the program also offers other sequences primarily fornon-majors — Mathematical Methods for Biological or Social Sciences and Mathematical Methodsfor Physical Sciences— which have a sophisticated calculus sequence as a prerequisite. Multiple "services" at many levels and a variety oftracks — ordinary/honors, pure/applied, B.A./B.S.— which allow different students to progressaccording to their different interests andcapacities have to be kept in mind to appreciatewhat the program as a whole provides. While it isrecognized that there are other starting points forwork in mathematics than the initial heavy emphasis on calculus and analysis, such a startingpoint is not without reason given the many students the program services and the importance ofcalculus for those students. The program hasanother important feature. There is a strong lecture series given by a different senior facultymember each quarter which attempts to explorethemes or material found in these courses in orderto indicate how they could be extended, how different organizations of mathematical work mayconsequently arise, and to provide some groundsfor choice about further work in mathematics beyond these courses. These lectures are attendedand are meant to be attended by both mathematicsmajors and other students. Again, though thelecture series may appear to be "extracurricular," it, together with various "secondquartet" requirements, does provide ways ofovercoming provincialism and "surveying" vari-89ous areas of mathematical inquiry.We could continue with the presentation offurther variations and could also provide moredetails about the specific organizations of variousprograms. But we hope enough has been said toindicate the kinds of specific organizations and theuse of similar devices for diverse concrete purposes. Furthermore, it is important to emphasizethat much of what we have reported and muchelse that we could report simply did not exist tenyears ago.Section VIThe emphasis of this report has been four-yearprograms made up of delicately interrelated andmutually reinforcing components. Given this emphasis, some present practices may seem anomalous. Also there are certain practices which seemto some to be problems which require extendedconsideration. The practices we discuss in thissection are not at this time, in our opinion, realanomalies or serious problems in the senses discussed, though they might become so in the future.The professional option "programs" may seemto be anomalous because the last year is not partof a program in the College. Professional option atpresent reduces, for all practical purposes, to theoption in the Business School. (The options inLaw and SSA are too recently instituted to havehad any real effect.) But if one thinks of this option as a "program," it is the eighth largest program in the last five years in number of studentsgraduated. A student, according to present requirements, has to complete thirty-three coursesin the College before the option can be exercised.These courses are broken down in the followingfashion: twelve common core, twelve secondquartet, three to five courses constituting a "substantial start" in a concentration, and four to sixelectives. In 1973, the College Council decidedthat the option could be exercised from any "concentration" in the College. We think that this decision needs to be reexamined. If all that we havesaid about four-year programs makes sense, including sustained work in a field of inquiry andthe delicate interrelation of other courses to thiswork, then it is unclear how simply adding a"fourth year" in the Business School to any program makes sense. We think it does make sense aspart of some programs in the College, but not aspart of most or all programs. This is right now aminor problem at best, since all but a few of thestudents who do exercise the Business School option are in the Economics/program. This program,90 especially given the way it understands the studyof economics, seems to allow for business schoolwork as a plausible extension of work in the"concentration." This can perhaps be said ofsome other concentrations. Nonetheless, thelegislation on the books, though not present practice, dqes seem to us to do violence to the spirit ofwhat it is to be a program in the College.In addition, the fact of transfer students mayseem to do violence to what we have said aboutfour-year programs. We do not see this as a realproblem given present practices. Over half suchstudents are required to take "core," approximately half in the social sciences and humanitiesand another half in the physical and biological sciences. Moreover, they may be given credit forwork in "concentrations" with departmental approval and for various "second quartet" requirements. Also, a large number of courses taken atthe first institution are counted as electives. Wesee the sense of organization and the understanding of that organization in a concrete way to bemore important in general than the fact that acourse is taken at another institution. Students inthe "four-year" programs do at times takecourses at other institutions and receive credit forthem. On this basis, invidious comparisons between all transfer students and "four-year" students seem silly. This is not to say, however, thatperhaps more thought ought not to be given to theway in which courses are counted in order to be inline with the multiple purposes served by coursesin each of the "core," "second quartet," etc.,categories. Yet, even now, when such courses arecounted, much care is given to these matters andit is the case that many courses a student hastaken at some other institution are deemed notuseable towards a Chicago degree. This possibility is made quite clear to potential transfer students. In addition, it might be useful to explain inmore detail to transfers why certain courses areacceptable and others not and, in particular, thevaried ways courses already taken are meant toserve multiple purposes within a four-year program. It is unclear to us what the best mechanismsare for achieving this. But it is important to remember that transfers as a whole are thought todo quite well once they are here, and we heard nosuggestions that the practice of admitting transfersshould be stopped or seriously reduced. Also, the"flexibility" of any one four-year program is crucial to the ease with which an individual transferstudent can fit into a program. Moreover, it is important to remember that almost all transferscome to Chicago because of serious desire eitherfor more sophisticated work in a field of inquirythan was possible in their first institution in whichthe field was either not represented at all or notwell represented, or for greater "breadth" in theirundergraduate experience, and often a combination of both. Such desires, especially when theyarise out of the relatively clear recognition of theabsence of certain opportunities at the first institution, seem to us to be very much in the spiritof the four-year programs at Chicago as we understand them.The complaint is sometimes made that there aretoo many programs in the College. Those whomake this complaint suggest that there are toomany programs which do not share what appearsto us to be a generally accepted idea of presentpractices. We find no grounds for this in general.There seems to us to be a consensus that a program, in order to be a program in this College,must satisfy certain conditions. Just anything,even if it has a traditional name attached to it, isnot acceptable. Those who make this complaintalso at times suggest that fewer programs wouldmean a better organization or use of resources.This is simply not obvious to us.We think a number of facts and distinctionshave to be kept in mind. When the value of aprogram and the faculty associated with it is considered, it is rarely, if ever, possible to computethis value by counting the number of "majors" ina program. Programs and the faculty associatedwith them perform many services for students ingeneral, not merely for their "own." The presentcurriculum could not exist without such an extensive provision of "services for others." The primary value of the faculty associated with someprograms and of some faculty not associated withany undergraduate program can only be appreciated if one considers such "services." Furthermore, to abolish certain, usually small, programs in the College would not mean that newopportunities for faculty would obviously comeinto existence. In many such programs, there is asignificant overlap between the undergraduate"concentration" and the early part of thegraduate program. If anything, the problem, if it isreally a problem, is a University problem. TheCollege makes substantial use of existing University resources, but is not the sole justification fortheir existence. There has been rethinking of someof these programs at the graduate level and thishas resulted in either new committees or new degree programs. This has had an impact on Collegeprograms, and it is expected that there will bemore such rethinking in the future. Yet to say this is not to say that there may notbe too many courses, that there is not too muchoverlap among certain kinds of courses which areoffered, or that priorities about courses are alwayscarefully thought out. But such statements areabout courses, whatever the programs in whichthey primarily "exist" may be, not about programs as programs.In addition, programs are continually dying andbeing reborn. Very few programs have remainedfixed in substantial ways over the last ten years,and this must be considered when calculating thepresent value of a program. Programs have responded to new circumstances and have changedin substantial ways the curricular opportunitiesthey offer. Many programs with "traditional"names have undergone substantial changes andmore change is to be expected. Such changes havein part been possible because of changes in faculty. They are sometimes christened by the use ofa new name. But the continued use of a traditionalname is not a reliable sign of the absence of continuing programmatic deaths and rebirths whichare difficult to distinguish from those which aremarked by the use or extinction of new or non-traditional names. To say that too many "new"programs are coming into existence, if by this ismeant programs with new names, is to make aninvidious distinction and to do a serious injusticeto the many changes which have occurred in mostprograms. That some programs with new nameshave gone out of existence and that others may doso in the future does not trouble us because this iscomparable to the changes which have occurredin most programs. Furthermore, most, if not all,programs are fragile in some important way oranother.Yet to say this is not to say that we think thatsubstantial reorganizations of programs, whichmight have as one result fewer programs in theCollege, are not to be considered and that theprograms must continue in some way or anotheras they are now. We are reporting on presentpractices in general. We are not in the business ofmaking future projections, if for no other reasonthan that we would not have been able to predictthe imaginative changes responsive to new problems which have occurred in the last ten years.A related complaint sometimes heard is thatcertain programs, usually small ones, may be tooidiosyncratic in the sense that they are occasionsfor the indulgence of the whims of a small group offaculty. What seems to us important is that anyprogram must justify its existence in terms of a"corporate curricular personality" and that the91number of faculty associated with the program isin no obvious way a criterion of the presence orabsence of such a personality.Moreover, most faculty we talked -to were eagerto emphasize what is special or unique about theirprograms. Some argued that the very existence ofcertain programs or their existence as undergraduate programs was what made them special orunique. Others argued that certain portions or thepresent organization of their programs were notduplicated at other institutions. Still others arguedthat they continued, usually in a transformed way,certain traditions of inquiry which are identifiableas Chicago traditions and which have been and areinfluential in what is done at many other institutions. If one is to worry about possible idiosyncrasy of programs, our inquiry suggests that theworry should be College-wide. Part of the reason,however, that faculty stress the importance ofwhat we have called "corporate curricular personalities" was that such organization was an important way of clarifying that "special" or"unique" did not mean "idiosyncratic," thatwhat is special or unique is the existence of "corporate curricular personalities" in areas of inquirywhich other institutions have not been able togenerate, or that what is special or unique did notoverwhelm the program as a whole .A distinction between special or unique, on theone hand, and idiosyncratic, on the other, is consequently quite important. But the making of thisdistinction and the existence of "corporate curricular personalities" is, once again, not meant tosuggest that questions about the relative importance of different programs cannot be raised. Butto do so primarily or solely in terms of size, eitherof faculty or students, and without regard for themany functions most programs serve within thewhole curriculum, or for the conditions which it isthought a program must satisfy in order to be aprogram seems to us to be an implausible way toproceed.Another worry which some seem to have is thatsome programs, that is, programs other than one'sown, are too professional. It is not always clearwhat this is supposed to mean, but it is possible tosay that with respect to at least certain mattersrelevant to this concern there does appear to be aconsensus in present practices.We heard no complaints by the faculty wespoke to that exposure to and exploration of manyareas of intellectual activity was a bad policy orthat there was too much of it.^There was nosuggestion that the general present policies about such matters or the general and varied purposes ofsuch policies needed to be changed.Though faculty of a few programs suggestedthat more "concentration" work by their studentsmight put them on a par with respect to such workwitlj undergraduates in high-quality programs incertain other institutions, they nonetheless respected the limitations the College puts on suchwork and the place of such work in a four-yearprogram.The amount of "concentration" work requiredby different programs varies slightly if onlycourses with concentration labels are counted.However, if one takes into consideration the general patterns of four-year programs as providingrequirements for sustained work in an area of intellectual activity, the amount of such work seemsto be the same for all practical purposes across theCollege.Electives are at times used to make up"deficiencies." This is rare. Electives are oftenused to fill out work in a "concentration" if acertain type of degree is desired or to fill out workin the same general area. Thus courses counted aselectives are sometimes used to place a student inwhat is thought to be a better position for graduatework. To say that this should not occur is, wethink, to be blind to what some students can appropriately desire. It is one way to make use of theopportunities the College offers. But it is important to remember that except for the case ofdeficiencies and the special uses of electives incertain programs to be described below, no student is required to take certain courses as electives in order to get a degree of some kind withinany program. Electives are often used by studentsto explore a variety of matters and are one way inwhich such exploration, if it cannot fit into thesecond-quartet options of a collegiate division,can be counted. It is recognized that to infringe onelectives as free electives would seriously reducethe flexibility students in present programs have.It may appear that some programs do not reallyhave electives or a substantial number of electives. General Studies in the Humanities, Disciplines of the Humanities, PERL, Ideas andMethods, and Tutorial Studies are so constructedthat, in various ways, it is hard to separate outwork in a "concentration" from "elective" work.Each of these programs, except for TutorialStudies, has an "introductory" sequence or sequences. These sequences are meant to providegeneral resources by which a student can work ina more sophisticated fashion on projects which92are not in some obvious way the kinds of problems or projects treated in other programs. Consequently, these "introductory" sequences tendto be more "instrumental" than those of manyother programs and are not meant to constitutethe "core" of the "concentration." Rather the"concentration" is, more fundamentally, thework on the individual project or projects. Theprojects are "individual" projects in the sensethat they do not fit into other programs of theUniversity. A student is "required" to take whatwould appear to be more courses in a "concentration" than in other programs for a number ofreasons. One is to insure that the student hassufficient opportunities for supervised individualwork in so-called independent study or researchcourses. Another is, by having the student take avariety of familially related courses from wherever relevant in the University, to insure that anappropriate "breadth" of concern is present andthat idiosyncratic projects are not acceptable. Stillanother is to allow for "preparatory" or "introductory" sequences which permit in most circumstances more sophisticated articulation ofproblems and projects. A more plausible way ofviewing the situation, perhaps, is that more time isneeded to insure that individual students are in aposition to and do in fact work on projects whichare not idiosyncratic or provincial. They "elect" aproject and the problem is the reverse of mostprograms in that the "election" needs much toinsure that it is not idiosyncratic. Furthermore,students must apply to these programs and theapplication involves a statement of the project orprojects to be worked on. In addition, the consequences of being in such a program areexplicitly detailed at the time of application.From the evidence we have been able to gather,many or most students in the various programs, ifthey do go on to graduate work, do not go on inwhat is the field of their undergraduate programnarrowly conceived. That there is no simplematch of undergraduate and graduate in this waysuggests a number of things. Students do seem tobecome aware that their intellectual world is notthe only one, that a program can be a base forwork in many possible areas, both within andwithout the general areas designated by the various collegiate divisions, and that work in one program does not define or lock a person into someobvious career. Some of this may be due notmerely to the various organizational deviceswhich have been generated to overcome provincialism, but also to such simple facts as that fac ulty from supposedly different intellectual worldsare literally seen to relate to each other. We maytake much of this to be natural, but visitors fromother institutions continue to find it remarkable,again in a literal sense. However, in addition,many programs in all the collegiate divisions seemto go out ot their way to make such mattersexplicit.Furthermore, we feel confident that the variouscombination bachelor-master degree programs arenot being misused in certain potentially harmfulways. Students are only admitted into such programs if their overall work, and not merely "concentration" work, is of high quality. This is monitored by the dean of students office.Section VIIIt is now possible to list some categories and distinctions at times used locally to discuss our curricular problems and opportunities which we thinkare obstacles to an understanding of present practices.The language of "core," "second quartet,""concentration," and "electives" is used constantly. They seem to have been generated aslabels of temporary convenience to talk aboutvarious aspects of the curriculum which needed tobe thought about in order to deal with the hopespresented in the Levi Memorandum and the 1966Curriculum Committee report. But these termsare not themselves part of those documents. Aswe understand them, these terms were meant tobe rather empty ones which were to be "filled up"in appropriate concrete ways by the collegiate divisions and the various programs. This "fillingup" or, to be more precise, agreement on thecontrolled ways in which they may be filled up,has taken place. The results are varied, as theyshould be and as we think they were meant to be.We think the language has served its purpose andthat to be just to the results other language oughtto be used, at least in part. We use these terms attimes in our report, but this use is meant to be atransitional one which we hope will make what wesay more intelligible than if we were to disregardthem completely. What we find particularlytroublesome is the idea that these terms refer tocompletely separate parts of the curriculum andthat the responsibility for the different parts isnecessarily to be found in different places. In addition, we find disturbing the idea that one criterion or set of criteria need to be invoked in order todecide if a course is really "concentration,""second quartet," "core," etc. The attempt to93pigeonhole courses in this fashion does seriousinjustice to the fact of the delicately balancedcomponents of any one four-year course of study,which components may be used for different purposes and in different "parts" of other four-yearprograms. If these terms are used at all, theyshould be used only if one bears in mind the complexities which render them ambiguous.Rather than repeat in detail the reasons why wefind these categories to be troublesome, we will goon to other distinctions. The reasons which makethese other distinctions troublesome are alsoreasons against the often simplistic use of "core,"' ' second quartet, ' ' etc .A distinction sometimes used to talk about curriculum is the supposed difference between general and special. "General" is often used to referto the first two years of work (or, more accurately,to "core" and "second quartet," since suchcourses are not always taken in the first two years)and "special" to the second two years (or, moreaccurately, to work in the "concentration").General is usually defined negatively to meanwork outside of the "specialized" work of the"concentration." But if the idea that sustainedwork in an area of intellectual activity is a plausible one, then, in order for the student to recognizean area as one among many, the student is required to take sequences of courses, usually in thesame general area or family of work, to see concretely the differences among related fields ofwork. These same courses may also function asprerequisites to work in an area. Such courses arenormally counted in the "second quartet generaleducation" slots. But at least some of their purposes make no sense if they are not adjusted towork in a "concentration," not in the sense ofadding courses to the "concentration," but in thesense that work in this "concentration" needsother somewhat definite work if the work in the"concentration" is not to be provincial and is tobe kept in proportion. But then this means thatsome sequences are more appropriate than othersin achieving these purposes, given work in anyone "concentration." In addition, courses whichare counted as part of one concentration may bethe courses which, for another concentration,make that concentration less provincial and are invarious ways supplementary or complementary toit. Therefore, to say some courses are "general"or "second quartet" while others are "concentration" without taking into consideration the entire four-year program is to do enormous injusticeto current practices. If the distinction is to be used at all, it seems plausible to us to say that the four-year programs we have are, in organizationalterms, general education, but that the organization is presented concretely at each step in varying durations of specific or "special" problems,materials, and modes of analysis.Another distinction some use is that some programs are wide, while others are narrow. Again,this distinction does not seem to take into consideration the many organizational devices which aremeant to overcome provincialism in all four-yearprograms of study. In addition, it does not seem totake into consideration the extensive use in many"concentrations" of courses with labels fromother programs or the use of electives to createwhat is in effect a "minor" in a relatively unrelated area of work. Finally, at any one time someprograms might seem wider because of theirseeming interdisciplinary titles. But this is toargue that the supposedly more traditional areas,at least in terms of nomenclature, are necessarilynarrow because they are traditional. If nothingelse, this does an injustice to. the constant shiftsand realignments going on under traditionalnames. In addition, it reifies names and fails torecognize that a program, whatever it is, mustargue for its existence on the basis of a relativelydistinct set of problems, which are expressed organizationally in curricular practice, which set ofproblems constitutes a valid and manageable fieldof intellectual work and is as such one amongothers, whatever the age or familiarity of thenames and irrespective of the number of "ands"in the name of the program.A related distinction is between programs associated with graduate departments and thoseuniquely collegiate. The arguments made againstthe plausibility of wide and narrow also applyhere. In addition, the distinction cannot rest onstudents from one type of program going tograduate or professional school while studentsfrom the other type do not. The facts simply donot sort out that way. Moreover, this distinctionturns on a distinction among programs simply interms of so-called concentration work. Any distinction which turns on separating one "part" of aprogram as special and as definitive of a four-yearcourse of study does violence to what it is to be aprogram in this College. The distinction might beused to suggest what might be the special vices oftwo types of programs, or at least "concentration" work in a program. There might be a temptation for some working in a program associatedwith a graduate department to suggest that under-94graduate work in the area will not make senseuntil some plateau is reached in graduate work.There might be a temptation for some working in aprogram uniquely collegiate to suggest that as longas we (that is, I as faculty, you as student) understand what is occurring, that is sufficient, andthere is no need to worry about validating suchwork within a broader academic community.These would be vices, but we found that programswork very hard to overcome such temptations organizationally over four-year work and within"concentration" work. The fact of organizationfor purposes of undergraduate work is a necessarycondition of having a program and there is constant effort to meet this condition.Finally, some distinguish programs on the basisof rigid and loose requirements. This at timesseems to mean specific, regularly taught courseswith a uniform content as opposed to a number ofdifferent courses which satisfy an "x number ofcourses from a certain number of areas" formula.At other times it seems to mean a specific sequence of courses as opposed to courses some ofwhich do not need to be taken before some othercourses, or courses which constitute a clusteramong other possible clusters in a program. Insofar as the distinctions reflect "facts," and theydo so only to a degree, we see no need in principleto attach praise or blame to any one side of thedistinction. Each has its characteristic vices ordifficulties which it presents to students. In addition, the differences in part reflect the kind ofunity or coherence which it is judged possible topresent organizationally as a basis for undergraduate work. If some programs were reallyrigid, appropriate and necessary flexibility wouldbe impossible. On the other hand, no program isopen-ended. Furthermore, the distinctions between rigid and loose seem to fail to consider theneed in all programs, though in varying degrees atdifferent stages, for faculty guidance. In someprograms, beyond a certain point, a student cannot register in any quarter without having justifiedhis or her choices and without a signed agreementfrom the appropriate faculty adviser. In areas inwhich some or considerable use of independentstudy, reading courses, or research is plausible, itis usually the case that a faculty adviser or acommittee of faculty advisers must agree to thearrangement and monitor the progress of a student's work with a tutor throughout the quarter.This is true in both seemingly rigid and loose programs. Furthermore, the extensive use of seminars, workshops, extended paper requirements, comprehensive examinations, etc., is meant to require the student to work closely with others in asupervised fashion and to "test" and encourageexplicit reflection on the degree of coherence thestudent has attained in his or her program. To putthis generally, one use of some of the flexible resources we spoke of earlier is to provide specificcontrols on, and opportunities for reflecting on,the coherence it is possible to attain in any oneprogram. The concern, we think, should be withthis, however attained, rather than with the usually pejorative rigid/loose requirements distinction.Section VIIIMost of the relatively serious problems that wethink need to be confronted are in one way oranother about the accessibility of various kinds ofinformation, opportunities, or resources whichexist or should exist. These problems can betalked about in terms of the kind and quality ofchoices which are or can be made by students atvarious stages of their undergraduate careers.When something is chosen is often as important aswhat is chosen. But it should be obvious by nowthat, in our opinion, to talk about such choices issimultaneously to talk, to a significant degree,about the organizational opportunities anddifficulties of four-year programs, taken individually or collectively. The statement of problemswhich follows does not, for the most, part, distinguish problems as more or less important. Wethink all of them are important. However, werealize that simple solutions to all of them whichwould be in obvious harmony with each other andwhich would not do extreme violence to manypresent practices are probably not possible. Consequently, choices may well have to be madeabout which problems to feature at any one time.Yet it is also possible that suggestions other thanthose we sometimes offer will be forthcoming andthat these will allow for a more coherent set ofsolutions to most, if not all, of the problemssketched below.Once again, this list of problems is not meant tobe exhaustive. In addition, our suggestions are notmeant to be legislative proposals. As was saidearlier, we think these problems are to a largedegree problems which arise out of a commitmentto current curricular practices taken in general,and that it is important that the reader recognizethat an acceptance of present practices commitshim to confront these problems as problems.There is much effort given to the provision of95appropriate information. There are serious attempts to start from, further shape, and buildupon the experience and interests a student already has. There are extensive opportunities forexposure and exploration. There is substantial organizational flexibility which allows for differentemphases in individual programs and for changesin program. There is a continuing effort in manyareas to deal with the difficulties of students on anindividual basis. Yet we think these and othermatters deserve further serious consideration.One source of difficulties seems to be the formatof the present college catalogue and of the collegiate divisional announcements. These tend tobe general statements of purpose of programsfollowed by a bare statement of requirements andcourse listings. These simply do not do justice tohow most programs think of themselves, how theorganization of the program is expected to work insome detail, or why the organization is as it is. Inaddition, the various functions of "collegiate" requirements and their relation to "concentration"requirements are not made apparent in most casesin any detail. The faculty we talked to were eagerto talk to us about these matters and were ofteneloquent about them. Rewriting of the announcements to bring out the hows and whys would notmerely help students and college advisers, butwould also provide faculty with a better basis ofinformation of what their colleagues are about.Perhaps a separation of programmatic statementsfrom a detailed listing of courses might allow suchstatements to be printed in one "book" easilyavailable to all. The desirability of one such bookis a question that we think needs to be consideredseriously. We understand that some considerationof these matters has already begun. Such a bookcannot be a substitute for concrete experience ofwork in various areas. But it may do much todispel the misconceptions of what it is possible todo in the various programs which do exist and toclarify expectations about the interrelation of alternative components in a four-year program.Another problem of information that seems tohave serious consequences arises out of the increase in student interest in post-collegiate professional education. A large number of studentsseem to believe that there is some special programmatic route or routes which will make themmore attractive candidates for admission to professional schools. Consequently certain programstend to be viewed as the obvious or practicallynecessary pre-law, pre-med, pre-business routes.This does not merely increase the number of stu dents in certain programs in an unnecessary wayand create difficulties for certain programs in providing appropriate educational opportunitiesgiven limited faculty resources. It may also decrease a student's chances for admission to professional school. The student may appear to admission committees to be simply another studentof a certain general type. Or, the student may be"living" in a curriculum that has less interest forthat student than some other one with the consequence that the work done is somewhatmechanical and does not represent the real qualityof collegiate work which could be done by thatstudent. More importantly, students at earlystages of their undergraduate career seem to beunaware of or simply do not believe that professional schools do not look with special favor oncertain programmatic routes. Many seem to become aware of or believe this later in their undergraduate career. But they then feel locked into aprogram because of work already done. A moreconcerted effort to make students aware of suchfacts early in their undergraduate careers, perhapsby having more extensive sessions with professional school people, would probably do much todecrease an unnecessary flocking of students tocertain programs, allow for a better use of existingprogrammatic resources, and allow certain students to flourish in what may be for them a moreplausible undergraduate program.Students may, however, be attracted to or feellocked into certain programs for other reasons.When certain kinds of exposure and explorationare or can be taken advantage of is at least asimportant as the existence of such opportunities.Certain programs feel that they are at a disadvantage in comparison to other programs becausetheir special concerns are not represented in oneof the core variants which students in the relevantcollegiate division are required to take. Thisseems to be a problem in all collegiate divisionsexcept for the special case of Biology which issimultaneously program and collegiate division.Furthermore, the difficulty seems to be particularly acute for such programs as Statistics, Geophysical Sciences, Art, Music, arid the "exotic" civilization programs. Exposure to and exploration of these areas is either required or strongly encouraged as part of the second quartet incertain collegiate divisions. But this experiencemay occur rather late in a student's undergraduatecareer when substantial work in a program hasalready occurred/The appreciation by advisers ofdifferent patterns of courses which may be ap-96propriate for different students in the "year in(some) common" and greater encouragement ofearly exploration and exposure to other areas before further sustained work seem to be in order.We realize that this may require more extensiveexploration with individual students of possibleinterests and a more detailed presentation of various possible patterns, especially for first- andsecond-year students.Another problem relevant to considerations offlexibility is the availability of appropriate familially related courses across collegiate divisionsand, in particular, the present form of theHumanities second quartet requirements. ThePhysical Sciences Division appears to have noproblem finding appropriate courses in all theother collegiate divisions. The Biological SciencesDivision seems to have some difficulty with thenumber of courses Humanities makes available,but seems to have no problem with finding appropriate courses in the other divisions. Theremay be some problem with the availability ofcourses from the Biological Sciences for the use ofthe Social Sciences Division, but Social Sciencesdoes not seem to have problems with the otherdivisions. The Humanities Division appears to bein a more troublesome situation. Appropriatelyfamilially related courses from all the other collegiate divisions do not seem to be available. (Weconsider most history and civilization courses as"humanistic") It is unclear why this problemexists. The Humanities second quartet is almostentirely constructed from courses within its owncollegiate division. The kinds of courses whichstudents are expected to take are plausible ones,and are familially related to work in mostHumanities programs or are a way of providingsome opportunity for basic language work whichwill then allow students to enter one of the"foreign" language and literature programs or theLinguistics program. But such an "organization"may well generate expectations on the part of students, which, when added to the guidance given tothem by advisers, create an attitude that coursesfrom other divisions are irrelevant. Something likethis may have occurred in the past, when othercollegiate divisions did offer seemingly appropriate courses and these courses were taken byvery few, if any, students from the HumanitiesDivision. On the other hand the problem may inpart exist because of some special expectationswhich the Humanities Division has about suchcourses which are not communicated very well toor shared by other collegiate divisions. The con sequence is that students can easily becomelocked into this collegiate division and its concerns at a very early stage and not be encouragedto explore and be exposed to other possibilities,especially if the core requirements of physical science and biology are allowed to be satisfied whena student is already far along in his or her undergraduate career.A related matter about which we are puzzled isthe extent to which a department can decide on itsown not to offer certain basic sequences duringthe summer quarter. Such sequences are important to many students outside the program for avariety of purposes. In part, the need for takingsuch courses in the summer arises out ofscheduling conflicts during the school year or outof the need of students who wish to change majorsto make up basic work in order to continue withmore advanced work. We are informed that insome cases a department, at times at the last minute, decides not to offer such a sequence or, if itis offered, it is the result of heroic efforts of one ortwo faculty, year after year. The absence of suchsequences during the summer either requires thatstudents take a comparable sequence at anotherinstitution, if that is acceptable; be forced to add ayear to collegiate work; or be tempted to drop thepossibility of switching majors.Another difficulty is that various programsthink of one variant of the core as a better "introduction" to their concerns in the sense that thevariant tends to create a constituency for a program by getting students acquainted with, interested in, and excited about certain possibilities.For example, Anthropology tends to think of Social Sciences 121-2-3 as its introductory course,and something similar can be said of Public Affairsand Social Sciences 161-2-3, Philosophy andHumanities 115-6-7, and the various programs inEuropean language and literature and Humanities110-1-2. These examples are not exhaustive. Thenames biology, physics, chemistry, mathematics,English, history, political science, for example,are at least known to most entering students, andthey have had in addition, for well or ill, some"academic experience" in these areas. But theconcerns if not also the names of many otherprograms are simply mysteries for most studentsand some early experience of their concernswould appear to be an appropriate part of orientation to University work. But the difficulties withthe relations of various programs and core variants are that they are not really made very clearto entering students and that the area a student97experiences is going to depend to a very large degree on accident. It is not clear to us whether suchrelations should be made clearer or whether suchrelations are in fact appropriate ones for corecourses. Furthermore, though programs claimthat taking one variant rather than another doesnot put students at a disadvantage, some "advanced status" in certain programs, in the senseof opportunities to take more advanced courses, isat times given to those who take the appropriatevariant.Still another difficulty arises out of the absenceof certain kinds of high school preparation. Theconsequence of this is that certain programs mayhave an advantage over others because they mayseem to be easier or quicker routes to the seemingly same result. Biology does not have thisproblem because of its special status as simultaneously program and collegiate division.Neither does the Physical Sciences Division atleast insofar as its fundamental requirements of"extended core"— two sciences (physics andchemistry), calculus, and other divisionalrequirements— are the same or similar for allprograms in this division. However, there appearsto be a different situation in the Social Sciencesand Humanities Divisions. For example, it is nonews to say that very few students come to thisUniversity with any real competence in foreignlanguages. The "exotic" languages do not expectany. The small number of students in any waycompetent in and comfortable with various"European" languages tends to reflect which languages are more often taught in high schools.Furthermore, the teaching of elementary languages has to overcome major obstacles such asignorance of grammar, including that of one' s ownlanguage. As one faculty member stated it: "Ifone or two students in a class of twenty can distinguish nouns, verbs, and participles and havesome idea of the difference between direct andindirect objects, I am lucky." There are studentswho may come to the University with an interestin literature or criticism or have such an interestgenerated or reawakened after arrival. Might itnot, for example, be very tempting for such a student to enter the English program? In such a program the student would seemingly not have todefer the reading of a substantial amount of literature or sustained critical work in the way thatstudents in other language and literature programsseem to have to do. Or, if a student is nonethelessinterested in some authors in other languages,such an interest may be satisfied by courses intranslation counted as either/electives or work in the "concentration." In addition, English doesnot have a comprehensive examination, whilemany other language and literature programs do.There may be students with an interest in an exotic culture. Might it not be very tempting for sucha student to enter the history program, for exam-pie? In such a program a student would not berequired to take at least two years of an "exotic"language in which it is more difficult to attain inthe same amount of time the same level of competence as in most European langauges .Poor teaching of languages or the absence ofwork in foreign languages on a high-school level;the, at besC extremely limited use of foreign language skills by other programs in the College; andthe deferral by many students of satisfaction oflanguage requirements until late in their undergraduate career, either because of fear or lack ofencouragement about the use of such skills, docreate serious obstacles for the opportunities offered by many programs in the College and seemto place an unnecessary burden on certain otherprograms. We cannot help but wonder what theaims of exposure to foreign languages are in factmeant to be for more programs in the College. Agreater encouragement of earlier acquisition offoreign language skills may not merely make theopportunities offered by various language and literature programs more accessible but also fosterthe greater use of foreign languages in other programs in the College. Many students, once theyhave taken such language courses, do seem to beeager to continue with such work, but feel that toomuch has already been done in another area. Or,they are eager to use their skills, but find littleopportunity to do so in the programs in which theyare working. \ ¦¦Many programs consider one of their primaryfunctions to be the focusing in special ways ofinterests students bring with them to the College.To use some extreme examples, students maycome to the College with a passion to involvethemselves with the "real" world, where "real"may mean such things as making pots, feeling religious, or solving this week's Washington crisis.It is an important function of, for example, Art,Music, Religion and the Humanities, Public Affairs, PERL and many other programs to startwith this "mystical" or "practical" passion andhave students recognize that many seemingly irrelevant "academic" enterprises are relevant totheir concerns and that such enterprises must berespected and cultivated if such passions are tohave any significance within broader public discourse and are to be translated into continuous98and plausible action. Consequently, one reasonfor the existence of some of these programs is toallow the student to begin with what they haveand to lead the student to a recognition of theinadequacy of the original passion taken alone andof the possibilities of intellectual exploration ofthese matters.Certain programs, however, seem to presentdifficulties to students who are unsure whether theconcerns of a program are in fact appropriate forthem. Students may come to the University with apotential interest in physics or chemistry, forexample, because of some acquaintance with issues of current research. Such programs arguethat their work must be presented in a certainsequence and that students must begin such workearly in their undergraduate career. The studentmay then have to put off possible exploration ofissues of current research in the field until he orshe is far along in the program or perhaps untilgraduate school. This is perhaps as it must be forthe most part. It is possible to argue that thesignificance of current research cannot really beunderstood without the proper foundation. Yet itappears that exposure to current research is provided in what is in effect the Physical SciencesDivision core variants for those students who arenot going to be majors in the physical sciences.(Furthermore, one of the results of such courses isthat some faculty teaching in them have recentlypublished books at the University Press whichdeal with issues of current research in an elementary but sophisticated way.) But a student with apotential interest in these matters is in effect toldthat he or she cannot take such courses if one is tobe a "serious" science student. Such a studentmust take the introductory physics or chemistrycourse. We appreciate that recent changes in theintroductory chemistry and physics sequences arein part meant to be responsive to some degree tothese problems. Yet it is still possible to worrythat such a student may in effect be required towork on faith or may simply abandon the possibility of such programs as shaping an undergraduate career because the need of the foundation has not been made concretely apparent. Thissplit between the two kinds of core courses in thePhysical Sciences is peculiar, especially whenconsideration is given to the problems of buildingon an interest in matters of current research and ofclarifying to a greater degree the need for variousfoundational work before other types of work canbe seriously engaged in.These various difficulties we have been talkingabout with regard to "core" courses and the gen eral problems of orientation, exploration, exposure, and flexibility lead to a more general set ofquestions and allow for a partial summary of whathas already been said.It is not clear to us what are the minimal conditions or aims which a sequence must satisfy inorder to be considered a "core" course. Part ofthe problem seems to be that many courses, notexplicitly labeled "core," can be considered ascore courses, for example, mathematics or language, or as introduction to work in an area, forexample, many of the introductory courses wementioned earlier, especially when a number ofthese are taken, as they often are, in combination.Given the multiplicity of variants in the present"core" courses, it is unclear why certain variantscould not be plausibly considered good introductions to at least some programs in a collegiate division, while other introductory courses could notin fact be considered "core" variants. A rule ofthumb by which these questions might beanswered may be that the "core variants" arethose courses plausibly taken by freshmen toovercome the gap between high school and University work, while others are best put off untilthis gap has been bridged. But again, there is nostrict requirement that these courses must betaken in the freshman year. Or another rule ofthumb to distinguish among variants may be thatsome are perhaps more appropriate for studentswho wish to continue in the collegiate division inwhich the course is offered or in a particular program in that division, while other variants aremore appropriate for "outsiders." Both of theserules of thumb seem to be used at times. Or theargument can be made that the "core" coursesdeal with fundamental issues. But part of the pointof our presentation in this report as a whole is thatthere are any number of kinds of foundational orfundamental courses, especially when these aretaken in some combination, as they often are, andit is unclear how the kinds of fundamental work,allegedly at stake here, are to be distinguished,especially given the multiplicity of variants. Butthere well may be other "rules" which should beor are featured and are in fact given priority. Themost recent public documents relevant to thisissue, reports of the masters in 1976, are attachedas Appendix D.Another question relevant to these matters iswho decides what is acceptable as a "core"course? Some seem to be variations of coursesfrom the "Old College," while others are morerecent innovations. If one or two faculty are askedto teach in one of these courses, how can they99participate in the planning of such courses? Somefaculty say that they are put off by the "cult atmosphere" surrounding some of these coursesand are puzzled that their questions about minimalconditions and aims are answered by a descriptionof a particular variant. None of this should suggestthat we are saying that the courses presently offered as "core" do not play a valuable role. Butgiven the passion sometimes associated with acourse being a core course, rather than somethingelse, we wonder if it is appropriate to continueexpressing a passion for something explicitlylabeled "core" which is to be opposed to manyother "introductory" offerings. This is, again, notto suggest that there may not or should not be adifference other than those we mentioned earlieror that these differences are insignificant.Furthermore, the fact of variants of a "core"course does not seem to us to be objectionable inprinciple. There seem to be good intellectualreasons for the possibility of variants. For example, one way to think about the core courses,whether present or future ones, is to take seriously the idea of organization we have used soextensively in our presentation of current practices. It seems possible to say that the "core" ineach division is concerned with "organized"phenomena dealt with in an "organized" fashion.The fact or degree of "organization" in this double sense may be part of what makes the difference between high-school treatments and treatments in this College. Whether the organizationbe one of living things, physical phenomena, individual behavior and "social" phenomena, or thearticulation of "human" experience, the doublesense of "organization" is present. Furthermore,it seems plausible to think that different "organized phenomena" and different strategic "organizations of inquiry" into these phenomena canbe featured in any one course. The fact of thisambiguity of "organization" would appear to bean intellectual fact which can in principle explainthe existence of variants. One way to clarify tostudents the fact of differences and its plausibilityand to make them sensitive to the need to thinkorganizationally at an early stage of their careersmight be to have a lecture series given by facultywho teach core courses in any one collegiate division and attended by all students taking the variant core courses. Such a lecture series runningthroughout the three quarters could attempt topresent the "organizations" of each variant andexplain why these can be plausible organizations.The value of such a lecture series might be not merely its usefulness for students but also the opportunity for faculty teaching these courses to appreciate better what is being done by their colleagues. This might well lead to useful exchangeof information and perhaps some greater sense of"commonality" than seems to exist presently insome collegiate divisions. Yet this suggestion isnot meant to imply that anything is acceptable as avariant, that decisions about what are or should bemore fundamental should not be made, or that theclose relation that sometimes exists between workin a particular program and core courses should bethe basic reason for the existence of particularvariants.Another concern that in part arises out of theseconcerns with core courses and in part out of thefact of transfer students is the use of placementtests, advanced standing tests, and equivalencyexaminations. It is not clear to us why certaincollegiate divisions or certain programs are able tooffer such examinations and others feel unable todo so. We find nothing wrong with such examinations in principle. In addition, we remind facultyof the practices of the "Old College" in whichcarefully constructed examinations testing manykinds of "learning" were used and used effectively. However, given the presumptions various"core" and "introductory" courses at this College sometimes make about their special character, it appears that a reexamination of currenttesting procedures may be worthwhile to insurethat the student who "places out" is aware of atleast some of the special features of what thesecourses hope to convey and that this is tested bywhatever appropriate mechanism. Moreover, itappears that a rethinking by at least some of thosewho currently do not offer such examinations is inorder. We realize that the construction of plausible examinations is a very time-consuming business, but such expenditure of energy may benecessary if we believe in what we say.There are also further difficulties about the assessment of student performance, the acquisitionof appropriate information and building on existing student interests and experience.It appears that many programs do not havesome systematic way of discovering what students think they are doing or what they are expected to do. This is in part a concern about individual courses. In some areas, assessment is accomplished by quarterly course appraisals. Butbeyond this, we think faculty should be more concerned about where students think they are at anyone time, what a student has accomplished so far,100or what difficulties may have been encountered. Itseems that this occurs in many programs, if it occurs at all, only at the end of work in a program.Sometimes this problem is dealt with in a generalway by vigorous student advisory committees,some members of which are elected to serve ondepartmental curriculum committees. A way togather more specific information might be to haveall students in a program periodically write upwhere they are, what they feel they have accomplished so far, etc. Such statements mightprove surprising and suggest changes in currentpractices. In addition, they might provide a betterbasis for faculty advice. Furthermore, they mightprovide an opportunity, on the student's part, for"expository writing" and, on the faculty's part,for diagnosis of potential difficulties in such writing.Another aspect of this problem is the degree ofclose contact between faculty and students. Attimes students are not "known" by faculty intheir "concentration" beyond their paper performance in large classes. When students need recommendations, they are compelled to go to faculty they may have had in a "core" or some othernon-concentration course. We find such a situation bizarre. Absence of close contact may well beone reason which explains some of the attritionrate at this College. Many programs, includinglarge and medium-sized ones, do provide opportunities for "individual research" with faculty.Many students do take advantage of such opportunities. But all do not. We wonder if part of thismay be a result of neglect of "ordinary track"students or of the unwillingness of many faculty towork extensively with individual students. Wethink such close and sustained intellectual contact, in whatever way it is achieved, is plausiblenot merely for purposes of providing bases forrecommendations, but also as part of a student'seducational experience. The program in whichthere appear to be the greatest difficulties isEconomics. Classes are large and there is only onefaculty adviser for some 200 students. In addition,though there is opportunity for "research" whichis meant to result in a senior paper written underthe guidance of faculty, this is in effect an "honors" track open only to students who do especially well. But such students are strongly encouraged to avoid this "track" and take a combinedB.A./M.A. if at all possible. We realize that, overthe last five years, there has been a four-fold increase in the number of students in this programand that the increase may be due to poor advice about the appropriateness of this program forpost-collegiate professional goals in comparisonto others. Similar remarks could be made aboutsome other programs, although the problem doesnot seem to be as extensive in these programs as itis in Economics. But it is still a serious problem.Something to be kept in mind is that there arelarge and medium-sized programs in which this isnot a problem. Furthermore, many of the substantial changes in the past ten years in curricularpractice can be understood as a direct response tothe problem of more sustained intimate intellectual contact between faculty and students.An important way in which some close contactbetween faculty and students is sometimesachieved is through the use of such "physical resources" as departmental lounges. Some programs find these to be quite useful and manyothers who have wanted and do want such a resource complained to us about the seeming lack ofinterest about such matters on the part of the"administration." In addition, some programs feltthat the physical separation of the collegiate anddivisional offices of a program and their separation from a program lounge, if one exists at all, is asubstantial obstacle to close contact of faculty andstudents. We hope that questions of "physical resources," when appropriate, are not consideredto be an unimportant part of the curricular resources of a program.There are some additional problems in certainareas with respect to appropriate use of facultyenergy and to the curriculum reflecting the organizational opportunities we have been talking about.For example, there seems to be some duplication of courses through ignorance of what othersare doing. Some group, perhaps the various governing committees, after an inspection of preliminary announcement copy, might be able to informvarious faculty or departments of potential duplications and inquire into the need for what appearto be duplications. Furthermore, a concern inmore areas with the frequency with which certaincourses are offered would seem appropriate. Aconsideration of problems of duplication and frequency have allowed various programs to organize their offerings in a more productive waywithout, in their opinion, doing any damage to theintegrity of their programs. It has also allowedfaculty to deal with students, especially themajors in a program, on a more individual basiswhether in seminars, workshops, or individual research projects.Many programs have made extensive use of as-101sociated faculty. But some appear hesitant to doso in a substantial way, though it is some of thesesame programs which also complain that they areseriously understaffed. Use of associated facultymeans in many cases not simply crosslistingcourses already given, but also, and probablymore importantly, discussing with such facultythe kinds of courses and other uses of their timewhich could be mutually beneficial and whichcould help to fill gaps in a number of areas.As an extension of this, we find it curious thatmany "staffs" do not appear to talk among themselves or to each other. Many do. But, for example, it is only recently that the "staffs" ofelementary language courses have begun to dothis to some degree. We found from our discussions that most appear to face similar if not thesame difficulties. Pooling of information andstrategies would seem to be useful. This mightlead to a consideration of other possibilities orproblems suggested by some of those we spokewith. For example, when faculty in various programs were asked about the use of foreign languages in their program, a number replied that ifstudents are encouraged to feel that they can usethe language, they begin to. The obstacles, according to these faculty, were a feeling by students that if they were not "fully competent,"whatever that might mean, they should not use thelanguage at all (that it was either "impure" or notpart of their expectations to use what languageskills they had, for example, to check or controltranslated material) and the seeming lack of practice in reading "non-literary" writing. In additionsome faculty suggested the idea of a series of lectures to be offered for all elementary students inwhich "language" would be discussed (for example, the relation of different grammatical possibilities in different languages) in a way that didnot depend on a knowledge of any particular languages and which might make the concern withgrammar in any one course less of a mystery andless of a burden simply to be lived through. Such aseries has begun and we understand that there areplans to increase the frequency of lectures.Another aspect of this "staff" problem is thatsuch "staffs" do not seem to exist except onpaper in some places in whicrrthey would seem tobe appropriate. We have no ideological commitment to staffs as an ideal or as particularlypraiseworthy curricular arrangements under allcircumstances. But they do seem especially important in sequence courses in which continuityamong the different courses is tcTbe, expected, continuity in the sense both of building upon whathas already been done in the previous quarter andof providing some similarity, when appropriate, inthe sequence when offered in different years.Again, in some areas, such considerations havebeen a primary focus of curricular concerns withthe consequences we mentioned earlier— forexample, a°large group of faculty knowing in detailwhat is being done in certain courses, especiallyintroductory ones, and being able to offer appropriate additional courses which can build upon arelatively solid base, etc.Section IXThere are two problems which are ultimately intimately related to many of the problems discussed in the previous section but which we thinkneed to be discussed separately.One problem is that there are a few programswhose corporate curricular personality is difficultto discern and which have at best a diffuse personality or multiple potential personalities implicitin what they presently do. This is not to say thatthe faculty of these programs are not distinguished, that individual courses may not be excellent, or that individual faculty do not providesubstantial services for others at many stages ofthe four-year curriculum as a whole. But it is tosay that it is difficult for us to discern what thefaculty of these programs think to be more important and less important in their programs except in the most general terms which are alsoapplicable to many, if not most, other programs inthe College.One consequence of the inability of thesegroups of faculty to distinguish and agree on whatis more important and less important in some detail is that the organization of these programs isextremely open-ended and their requirements arestated for the most part only in the form of generaldistribution requirements. These can be satisfiedby students choosing from a wide range of notobviously equivalent courses. Part of the requirements of many programs are stated in whatmay appear to be a general distribution form. Butthese other programs provide a variety of "controls" on such requirements which are not presentin the programs we are discussing. For example,such requirements are controlled by introductorycourses which in various ways provide a basis forchoice by students of what further work can bedone; by extensive guidance given to individualstudents with respect to possible coherent groupings of particular courses; by seminars or work-102shops in which all majors in a program work oncommon problems in a way not possible in othercourses either because of the number of studentsfrom different programs in such courses or because of the different coherent patterns of coursesappropriate for different students; by senior (andsometimes also junior) papers or comprehensiveexaminations which are meant to be both opportunities for and "tests" of the student's being ableto bring together what has been accomplished inmuch of his or her program; and by a number ofother curricular resources we have mentioned inthis report.On the one hand, the faculty of the few programs about whose corporate personality we arepuzzled seem to agree that such controls are useful and plausible ones. But they argue that it isdifficult to put them into practice because theseprograms are seriously understaffed. We are notin a position to say which programs are reallymore understaffed than others. But many programs have made extensive use of "associatedfaculty" to deal with this difficulty and we arepuzzled as to why these programs do not seem todo so. (Again, we are not merely talking ofcrosslisting some courses, but also, and more importantly, of working out with other faculty newcourses and other uses of their time.)Yet, on the other hand, the faculty of these fewprograms also at times argue that their "fields" donot admit of the types of coherence possible inother areas. We hope that we have made clear inour discussion with these faculty and in this reportthat we do not have some paradigmatic sense ofcoherence which must be satisfied and that anysuch sense of coherence is not required by or implicit in present practices in the College. But, inaddition to this, we remain puzzled about in whatsense the "field" is in fact a field in which, minimally, sustained undergraduate work should beencouraged. Furthermore, the claim that an areadoes not admit of detailed curricular organizationis one that was repeatedly made by many departments in the past, but which is now not beingmade by most, not merely in speech, but also notin curricular practice. Consequently, given all thechanges that have occurred in programs over thelast ten years, we feel that we in the College as awhole must be in general suspicious of claims thatcertain "areas" or "fields" do not by their natureadmit of greater coherence.Moreover, we are not particularly impressed bythe argument that since this or that program has acertain number of students, it must be adequate. The difficulties of accessibility and the somewhataccidental way in which student choices are andcan be made which we talked about in the preceding section must be appreciated and considered if a fair judgment of programs, whether nowor in the future, is to be made with respect tomatters of size, if, in fact, size is at all relevant tothe problems we are raising.We do not think that it is appropriate to presentthese matters in further detail at this time. Onceagain, the point of articulating this problem andother problems is to show the reader the type ofproblems which may need to be faced if one accepts current practices in general. Furthermore,all but one of the programs we are talking aboutare in the process of a curricular review. (Theother program which is not involved in such areview appears to be reopening the question ofwhether the program is an appropriate one for undergraduates.) Consequently, we think it plausibleto continue discussion with these programs andwait for the results of such reviews. If we hadbegun our investigations even two or three yearsago, a number of other programs would have presented similar difficulties. Many rapid changeshave occurred, notwithstanding various claimsmade before such changes were made. Onceagain, we hope we have made clear in this reporthow much of such change has taken place over thelast ten, and especially the last five, years.The other problem we think merits separatediscussion is one especially regrettable "trend."There seems to have been, over the last ten years,a slackening of responsibility by at least somegoverning committees for the general courses andindividual programs offered by a collegiate division. A number of governing committees seem tofeel that they lack "power." It is unclear what thismeans. But from all that we can discover governing committees have been, in the past, extremelyactive and did find it in their "power" to govern.This seemed to involve taking matters literallyinto their own hands and following through withsolutions to various problems. We agree with theDean of the College and the Committee of theCollege Council that a rethinking by at least somegoverning committees of what their responsibilities are and can be may be quite important forthe refinement and extension of current practices.Many of the problems we have mentioned seem tous to be part of the appropriate concerns and responsibilities of governing committees, and weare puzzled why they do not seem to have beenconsidered or seriously considered by these103groups. Given the present organization of theCollege, which some think needs to be rethoughtgiven past performance, it is these groups whichwill be the most obvious organizational entities toinitiate serious discussion about and carry throughwith solutions to many of these problems.Peter F. DembowskiClifford W. GurneyDonald N. LevineWilliam R. MartinDavid N. SchrammDavid J. Smigelskis, ChairmanWarner A. WickAppendix AThe following resolutions in the form of motionswere discussed and approved at the January 23,1979 meeting of the College Council.Motions Concerning the Advisory Function1 . We move that all students, other than first-yearstudents, be required to declare their concentration each quarter at the time that their I.D. cardsare validated. And we request that the registrardevise a system which will inform the appropriateprogram advisers as early in the quarter as she canjust who their concentrators are.2. Because of our deep concern with advisoryproblems, we urge that the masters and the deanmake every effort to place tenured, experiencedfaculty in those positions.Motions Concerning Scheduling3. We, the members of the College Council, arealarmed at the increasing number of courses in theCollege which do not adhere to official schedulingpractices as well as the growing number of seemingly avoidable scheduling conflicts.We propose therefore: the creation of a committee to be chosen by the dean in consultationwith the Committee of the College Council,which, making use of professional assistance,evaluates existing scheduling arrangements andproposes new procedures where appropriate.In the meantime, we urge that masters anddeans adhere to existing scheduling procedures;and, in addition, that the masters with their appropriate collegiate division committees in consultation with the program chairmen and Collegeadvisers, renew their efforts to avoid schedulingconflicts. Motion 1 is an attempt to respond to the following types of difficulties.A student declares a program at spring pre-registration. The student then registers for thenext year, perhaps without any requirement oreven an opportunity to talk with an appropriatefaculty adviser. Furthermore, a student maychange his or her mind over the summer or atsome other time during the following year. ACollege adviser may be informed of this change,but no mechanism exists for providing this information to the registrar who compiles lists of students in a program. If this occurs after the springpre-registration in a student's second year, a program may not be advised of this until after thenext pre-registration, in effect not until the beginning of the student's last year.In order to avoid such situations, one copy ofthe quarterly declaration could be sent immediately and directly to a designated programadviser, one to the College Advisers Office andone could be kept by the registrar. In addition, theCollege Advisers Office should immediately inform the designated program adviser of studentswho have changed from that program into anotherand of students who have "dropped out" of theCollege, whether permanently or temporarily.This would provide more accurate informationabout who is in the program and an opportunityfor faculty to offer advice. Many programs complain, with good reason, that they simply do notknow who is in their program and, consequently,are not able to offer serious faculty advice to atleast some students.Furthermore, since registration figures are soinaccurate and since discussions of programssometimes refer to size of programs, we offer Appendix C, which provides the number of graduatesin each program in the years 1972-1977, figureswhich are at least accurate.Motion 2 is a response to two types of difficulties present in some areas. New faculty are sometimes program advisers. This does not occuroften, but we are puzzled that it occurs at all. Afew years on campus does not insure wisdom. Yetit does provide an opportunity to learn somethingabout the program and the workings of the University, in particular the workings of the CollegeAdvisers Office. "Junior" faculty are sometimesprogram advisers. We hesitate to say that theyshould not be. But we all should be suspicious ofprograms, especially medium or large ones, inwhich this important function is normally assignedto "junior" faculty. Such a procedure suggests anindifference on the part of "senior" faculty for the104undergraduate program or a lack of recognition ofthe importance of the function. In addition,"junior" faculty may well be put into a position ofperforming a function which is thought by their"seniors" to be at best somewhat irrelevant totheir further career at this University.Motion 3 is in part a response to certain inexcusable and irresponsible practices. There are toomany instances of scheduling over two slots (e.g.,1-2 M W F or 1-2:30 M W or 9:30-11 T T or 2-3:30T T or 10:30 M T W T). This makes many othercourses in effect unavailable. But there may be anoverload on the Tuesday-Thursday hour-and-a-half schedule. If two days of an hour and a half orone day of three hours is really preferred by mostfaculty to an hour on each of three days, thenchanges in what are now the fundamental timeslots may be necessary. Or if more than threehours a week is thought to be necessary, specialtime slots not in conflict with the three-hours-per-week slots should be created.Motion 3 is also a response to conflicts whichare in a sense no one's fault given the presentsystem. There are scheduling conflicts amongcourses which many students are expected orwish to take in the same quarter. To avoid this,some group must find out which courses are orshould be normally taken together by most students at any one time and then inform the relevantprogram or faculty of what may be potentialscheduling conflicts.Both parts of Motion 3 will work only if facultydo not make casual changes after original commitments. More generally, we find curious the attitude of some faculty that if a course is in the timeschedule, there are no further worries or an "invisible hand" will somehow work out any problems. We also find it curious that a particular timeslot, whether normal or abnormal, is somehowthought to be the "right" of a faculty member, nomatter what the consequences may be.Appendix BThe College Curriculum Committee has beenasked to study current practices in the College.We therefore would like to discuss with you thefollowing questions about your concentrationprogram. We hope the information we gather willin time be useful in a variety of ways. For example, it may allow us to publicize models whichother programs might wish to consider in theirown reflections on their curriculum and its implementation. In addition, we hope that such information will allow us to think better about howother parts of the curriculum (e.g., core courses, "prerequisites," the second quartet, and electives) do serve and can better serve the aims andprocedures of concentrations and the education ofstudents.1 . What do you understand to be the principles oforganization of your concentration program (orprograms if there are alternative tracks)?A. Why is the program organized in thisway? In what way is this organizationinfluenced by outside restraints on the field,such as professional societies, demands ofgraduate programs, etc.?B. To what extent are major approaches toyour field not represented? Has this been acontinuing concern to most faculty associatedwith the concentration?C. Is your program in any way unique incomparison to similar programs at other institutions?D. What kinds of students with what kinds ofexpectations are best suited to your program?How is this communicated to the studentpopulation (e.g., core courses, publications,interviews on "application," etc.)?E. If a student is tentatively interested inyour concentration because of some acquaintance with problems being worked on incontemporary research in your field, is it possible for such a student to explore whether thoseinterests are serious ones through "lowerlevel" courses which treat such problems atleast to some degree, or must the student waituntil an extended set of prerequisites has beencompleted? Has this been a continuing concernof your program?F. What is a student prepared for? Whatspecific skills and capacities do you hope agraduate of your program to have? How doesthe concentration determine and measure thesekinds of competence? Are you aware of somespecial problems arising from different levels ofachievement and performance in your program?If the student only fulfills the minimum, whatskills and capacities does that student have andnot have? Is this a concern for the program? Ifso, how is it expressed in planning for the program and making it more effective?G. What can a student achieve by means ofyour program that cannot be achieved by meansof some other concentration in the College?H. Is there a committee in your concentration for College curriculum? How are coursesdecided upon? In what way does the department as a whole approve or oversee the program? How was it done for this past year?1052. How do you make the organization effective,by a pattern of publicly listed course requirementsand/or by advising? If by course requirements, arethey sequential? If by advising, is a student expected to propose a plan for the adviser to approve or modify?A. Is there a distinction between undergraduate and graduate courses? If so, what is thenature of the distinction? What proportion ofundergraduates take "graduate courses?" Ifthere are courses for both graduates and undergraduates, does this lead to different exams, requirements, discussion groups, or grades?B. Are there courses which have to be taughtevery year? If so, which courses and why? Isthere coordination of courses such that a studententering the concentration knows what will betaught for the next two or three years? Whatdevices do you employ to secure the regularstaffing of needed courses?C. Which courses, if any, does your concentration normally offer in the summer quarter? Forwhat kinds of students are these courses normally taught (e.g., those who wish to continue"normal" course work, those who wish to accelerate their work in your own program, in anotherprogram, etc.)? How many faculty does this involve? Is there a principled objection to offeringcourses or increasing the number you currentlyoffer in the summer quarter? If so, what is it?D. Is there any general policy in your concentration with regard to the requirements forpassing specific courses (e.g., exams, oral orwritten; papers , long or short, on assigned topicsor not; class reports, etc.)?E. If a final comprehensive exam or bachelorpaper is required, is this an important waycoherence is achieved in the program? If either isnot required, why not?F. If a final comprehensive exam or bachelorpaper is required, what are the normal expectations of quality? How does it differ from a"good" course exam or paper? How much timeis explicitly set aside in the program for preparation of such enterprises?G. Does your program provide senior seminars for which the student receives credit in theconcentration? Are these seminars required oroptional? Are they elective or invitational?H . If there are reading courses in which thereis one student and one faculty member, must orshould this be approved by someone else? Howextensive is your use of reading courses for morethan one student as additions to the explicitcourses provided in the concentratioln, and how extensive is your use of such courses as substitutes for regular courses otherwise available?I . What is the use of electives in your programand what is the basis of this use? How manytotally free electives does a student in your program normally have?J. What are the minimal requirements that astudent must riossess before entrance to finish infour years? When is the latest a student cannormally begin work in the concentration andfinish College in four years ? What is the minimalnumber of courses needed to graduate from yourprogram, apart from exemptions and advancestanding?K. How much time does a "good" student inthe concentration have for anything other thanacademic work, however defined?3. Have you devices which encourage students torelate the work they do in a specific course toother parts of the College curriculum? vA. To what extent is it the case that coursesacceptable in the concentration program musthave the departmental label of the program inquestion? To what extent does the programdraw on courses offered by other departmentsor concentrations for its concentration requirements? Is there a principled objection to usingseemingly relevant courses from other areas? Ifso, what is the principle?B. Particularly if program is sequential, inwhat way is ihaterial earlier in sequence used infurther courses? Is it tested on further exams sothat an expectation for continued relevance isbuilt in? If program has specific introductorycourses, how do they introduce or representmaterials and intellectual strategies which thestudent will meet in greater depth or detail lateron? If this is not so, why not?C. Are students in your concentration program allowed or encouraged to use materials orprograms not explicitly treated in the course inthe papers and research reports that are required by the course? If not, why not? Is this aconcern or goal of the concentration program asa whole?D. What is expected from laboratory experience? How are these expectations integratedinto the rest of the course and the concentrationas a whole?E. In what way are the Collegiate Divisionrequirements in langauges, mathematics, orcivilization course sequences utilized and builtupon in the concentration?F. Have you devices other than those already mentioned which encourage students to106reflect on your field as a whole or on its relationto other disciplines?4. What is the specific role of faculty in advising?A. When, if at all, are faculty advisers assigned? How are they assigned? What are theyexpected to do? Who, if anyone, oversees theirfunctioning or is there a pooling of informationperiodically by such advisers? Do the adviserscontact faculty teaching courses? Do they discuss with such faculty particular weaknessesand deficiencies of individual students? Whoapproves a student's concentration program?At what point(s) is this done? Who are youradvisers for this year?B. Who, if anyone, is charged with advisingstudents what to do or what they can do aftergraduation? What kinds of advice are given?What information do you have about what students do after they graduate?C. Is there a concentration policy about whoshould write recommendations? How manyfaculty of the department write substantialnumbers of recommendations for undergraduates? Do students in the concentrationtend not to use faculty in the concentration forrecommendations ?D. How are advisers in the Dean of Studentsoffice used? How well are they informed aboutyour program and in what way are they usefulto you as sources of information?E. Are there regular mailings that providestudents with information about the programand related activities?5. Apart from the formal program, have you devices for putting your concentrators in communication with each other (e.g., a club, informal col-loquia, etc.)?A. If a club, how frequent are the meetings?Is it undergraduate or mixed with graduate students? Do faculty attend? Is there a faculty adviser? If so, is such an adviser permanent orrotating? How is such a person chosen?B. If there are informal colloquia, how dothese relate to course work or research work?(Same questions about students and faculty asA above.)C. If there is a lecture series, what is itsfunction? How often is it given? Are there syllabi in existence for such lectures which wouldbe available to us?6. Does your program answer needs other thanthose of concentrators?A. What proportion of the students in yourconcentration courses are not concentrators inyour programs? What proportion of such stu dents are from other collegiate divisions, fromyour own collegiate division or are "unde-cideds?"B. How many and what kinds of courses, ifany, does your concentration normally offer forpurposes other than your concentration curriculum?C. What is the extent of the contribution offaculty in your concentration to core courses?What have been your major achievements in thepast three years in overcoming problems in yourconcentration program?What questions have we failed to ask about concentration programs, questions relevant either toyour own or other programs?Appendix CNumber ofgraduatesPrograms 1972-77Anthropology 97Art and Design3 21Art History 19Behavioral Sciences4 166Biological Sciences 409Chemistry 97Classical Lang, and Lit. 9Disciplines of the Humanities1 20Economics 127English Lang, and Lit. 163Far Eastern Lang, and Lit. 10Far Eastern Studies 4General Studies in the Humanities 84Geography2 50Geophysical Sciences 15Germanic Lang, and Lit. 13History2 168Ideas and Methods 22Linguistics 34Mathematics 128Music 17Near Eastern Lang, and Lit. 16New Testament and Early Chr. Lit. 3Philosophy 47Physics 77Political Science 142Politics, Econ., Rhet., and Law1 21Professional Option in the Business School 106Public Affairs 29Religion and the Humanities5 21Romance Lang, and Lit. 24107Russian Civilization 5Slavic Lang, and Lit. 22Sociology 53South Asian Civilization2 6Statistics 7Tutorial Studies 13'These programs were not fully operational until after 19722These programs have "variants" in two collegiate divisionswhich are counted as one program for present purposes.3This program is a recent transformation of Fine Arts and thenumber listed is for the Fine Arts program.4This program is the most recent incarnation of earlier programs in Psychology, Human Development, and Human Behavior and Institutions. The number listed is for the earlier programs.5This program is a transformation of History and Philosophyof Religion. The number includes students from that earlier program.Ashum, Medieval Studies, Classical Civilization,and Social Philosophy are programs which are toonew to have had graduates.In addition, the programs in CivilizationalStudies, General Studies in the Social Sciences,History and Philosophy of Science, andPhilosophical Psychology went out of operationduring this period and are not counted for presentpurposes.Appendix DBiological Sciences Common CoreThe Common Year experience in biology consistsof many three-quarter sequences from which students select one. While an attempt is made tomaintain as much flexibility as possible, studentsmay only move from one sequence to another bypetition to the associate master, who is responsi- -ble for the construction of the sequences. Thethree-quarter courses are to a greater or lesserextent sequential, depending upon the particularsequence.At first glance, the individual sequences mayappear to be in no relationship one to the other.This impression represents an incorrect reading ofthese offerings. Thus, every attempt is made toinsure that each sequence illustrates the modes ofinquiry employed by biologists and considers thefundamental phenomena of biological continuity(C), organization (O), regulation (R) and adaptability, and evolution (E). This requirement constitutes the major basis for the construction ofeach particular sequence of three courses and isalso a major basis for limiting the movement ofstudents from one sequence to another. By happenstance, rather than by design, several of thesequences employ common texts. A group of committees is soon to be engaged inreviewing the content of the biological sciencescurriculum to determine whether further requirements should be imposed upon the CommonYear.The detailed fashion in which each facultymembeV deals^with his topic is largely a matter ofhis preference. Depending upon the anticipatedcoverage in the sequence, a faculty participantmay be called upon to slant his course so as toencompass one or another aspect of biologicalcontinuity, organization, regulation, or evolution,and invariably teachers are cooperative. One ofthe major attributes of this arrangement is that itenables us to recruit faculty teachers with a levelof pain which is readily tolerable to us, to thedivision and indeed, we hope, to the University.Faculty participants in general teach with enthusiasm and enjoyment. Indeed, the enthusiasmthe faculty are able to bring to the teaching of thecourse and materials close to their own fields ofresearch and scholarly concentration is stimulating to the students and must be set off against anylack of commonality perceived in our CommonYear offerings.The overall content of each sequence and theextent to which it covers the Common Year requirements is carefully reviewed by the associatemaster. This is often accomplished by assemblingthe staff of each sequence together. Ideally,copies of all course materials are held in theBSCD office to facilitate integration of the threecourses in each sequence.While most of the courses are offered to groups- of 30 students, there are several large lecturecourses for groups of 60 to 150 students. Thus,each student will generally have had one or morediscussion courses in the biology Common Year.Some, but not all, sequences have one laboratorycourse among the three. We would like to movetoward one laboratory course per sequence. Several variants of the biology Common Year are extant or planned: a) a joint six-quarter venture withthe Physical Sciences Collegiate Division; b) acomplete sequence offered in the summer; c) asequence starting in the winter.Godfrey S. Getz, MasterApril, 1976Social Sciences Common CoreThe following guidelines for thinking about corecourses in the social sciences were developed by108the Governing Committee of the SSCD and circulated to all faculty in the SSCD and the SocialSciences Division in the winter quarter. They will,I hope, provide useful background for our discussion.A common core course in the social sciencesmay be said to have two principal objectives: 1) todevelop the student's capacities for critical reading, writing, and discussion; and 2) to introducethe student to some of the major organizingthemes, conceptual frameworks, and modes ofenquiry in the social sciences.Thus a common core course is not intended as asurvey introduction to a particular field (or fields);it does not seek primarily to communicate a particular body of information. Instead, it seeks toexplore conceptual models of social organizationand individual behavior; to introduce students tomodes of inquiry characteristic of the social sciences as a field; to analyze some of the grandthemes common to the various social-scientificdisciplines. A common core course is introductory in the simple sense that it is intended for beginners and assumes no specialized knowledge.But in its exploratory and analytical approach, itis perhaps closer to the kind of teaching that occurs in seminars and advanced courses in a discipline than to the elementary courses in any particular field. It also provides the opportunity, froma teacher's point of view, to develop ideas andinterests that may be broader than any particularsocial-scientific discipline or subdiscipline.The first objective referred to above is normallypursued through some or all of the following: a)assigning short papers which require some independent analytic effort; b) enabling the students totake part in small-scale research projects; c)avoiding exclusive reliance on lecture presentations; and d) promoting the students' participationin classroom discussion through such devices asdialectical teaching, having the students raisequestions for discussion, or having assigned students make brief presentations in class.The second objective is normally pursuedthrough some or all of the following: a) using textsof some richness and depth which are addressedto some of the enduring general problems of thesocial sciences; b) using contrasting materialswhich illustrate what happens when a cognateproblem is treated through different conceptualschemes and/or methodologies; c) emphasizinghow problems are formulated and solved andavoiding attempts to cover an entire field throughheavy use of textbooks or survey lectures. Core Courses currently offered in the SSCD:Soc. Sci. 111-112-113(Political Order and Change)Soc. Sci. 121-122-123(Self, Culture, and Society)Soc. Sci. 151-152-153(Urban Structure, Public Policy, and SocialAnalysis)Soc. Sci. 161-162-163(Equality and Community in ContemporaryAmerica)Keith M. Baker, MasterApril 15, 1976Physical Sciences Common CoreAt the present time there are ten alternative sequences that fulfill the Common Year requirementin the area of the physical sciences:Phys. Sci. 108-109-110(The Earth Sciences: Earth, Atmosphere,and Oceans)Phys. Sci. 111-112-113(Matter, Relativity, Energy)Phys. Sci. 115-116-117(Concepts of Physics and Chemistry)Phys. Sci. 118-119-120(Introduction to Astrophysics)Science 120-121-122-123-124-125( Joint Phys. Sci. /Biol. Sci. Sequence)Chemistry 105-106-107(Basic Chemistry)Chemistry 115-116-117(Basic Chemistry, Advanced)Physics 121-122-123(General Physics)Physics 131-132-133(General Physics, Honors)Physics 151-152-153(Physics, for Physics Majors)The prerequisite for each of the above isMathematics 102 or placement by examinationinto Mathematics 131 or higher. In addition,satisfactory performance on the Physical SciencesPlacement Examination is required for admissioninto the sequences in chemistry, and prior or concurrent registration in calculus is a condition foradmission into the sequences in physics.Students whose intended area of concentrationlies in the physical sciences (chemistry, geophysical sciences, mathematics, or statistics) are required to meet the Common Year requirementwith one of the chemistry or physics sequences.Students whose intended area of concentrationlies outside the area of either the physical sciences109or the biological sciences or who do not meet theprerequisites of the chemistry or physics sequences may fulfill the Common Year requirement with any one of the first five listed sequences. It is the intent of those latter sequences toprovide students with a range of alternative approaches to an understanding of the way in whichmodern science develops: the framing of assumptions, the statement of hypotheses and theories,the gathering of evidence, and the refinement ofconcepts by the continual interplay and refinement of theory and experiment. These themes arethe common denominator of the physical sciences, recurring in astronomy, chemistry, thegeophysical sciences, and physics — whatever thespecific subject of investigation may be.The five sequences (including the joint PhysicalSciences/Biological Sciences interdisciplinaryeffort that attempts to link physics and chemistrywith the great genetic, evolutionary, and symbiotic themes of biology) are quite different in content and emphasis. The new earth sciences andastrophysics sequences (formerly combined as"Rocks and Stars") are the most cohesive andinternally structured of the variants, as their titlessuggest. At the other end of the spectrum, Physical Sciences 111-112-113 addresses more limitedsubject areas in greater depth.Norman H. Nachtrieb, Master *April 12, 1976Humanities Common CoreI understand the scope of this first discussion to belimited to the Common Core. I stress this because, within the Humanities Collegiate Division,I am convinced that more problems exist with respect to how we have conceived and described the other general education requirements and in thepresent organization of our "major" programs.At present there are four sequential versions ofthe Humanities Common Core, each section ofwhich has an enrollment of eighteen to twenty-two ^students:Humanities 104-105-106Introduction to the Humanities 17 sectionsHumanities 107-108-109History, Philosophy, and Literature 13 sectionsHumanities 110-111-112Readings in European Literature 2 sectionsHumanities 120-121-122Greek Thought and Literature 3 sectionsIt is my understanding that what is "common" isa two-fold proposition: 1) that each version bestaff-conceived and staff-taught (thus all solo"variants" have been eliminated) and 2) that regardless of their particular subject matters therebe an attempt to discuss a representative varietyof genres and that attention be paid to criticalreading, careful writing, and intelligible speech.By either action or tradition, each version hastended to be the responsibility of either an identifiable and somewhat stable group of faculty orone or more departments.If I were pressed to offer any future projections,I would hope that it would be possible to introduce one or more "nonWestern" versions of theCore drawing largely upon faculty resourceshitherto unutilized and that there might be thepossibility of some sort of a senior-year, one-quarter version of the Core in which studentswould reread some of the same texts read at thebeginning of their College career.Jonathan Z. Smith, MasterApril 15, 1976110REPORT AND RECOMMENDATIONS TOTHE DEAN OF THE COLLEGE CONCERNING THE USE OFGRADUATE STUDENTS IN THE COLLEGEFebruary 1979PrefaceOne of the distinguishing features of this university and one of the main reasons why many undergraduates choose Chicago over other institutionsis that undergraduate courses are taught by ourdistinguished faculty. We have made the claimthat we do not permit graduate students to assumethe major responsibility for undergraduate instruction. These policies have contributed to thesuccess of our undergraduate program; however,it is very clear that graduate students do participate in undergraduate instruction in a number ofways. Their contributions may be very limited (aslaboratory assistants in certain disciplines, forexample) or quite substantial (as lecturers). Sinceany mention of using graduate students asteachers conjures up visions of the large-scale TAprograms found at many large universities, programs notorious for their shortcomings andabuses, it is this role of the graduate student inCollege courses that has commanded most of thecommittee's attention.We find no essential contradiction between ourpolicies and such practices as the use of graduatestudents as laboratory assistants, course assistants, teaching interns, tutors, graders, and readers. However, the general question of the use ofgraduate students as teachers in the classroom hascaused the committee difficulty. The practicewould most strongly conflict with our traditionalviews and public statements, and it is this practice, with all its conflicting aspects, which mayhave an effect upon the substance and quality ofinstruction in the College. We find ourselveswalking a tightrope, since we wish to acknowledge both pitfalls and benefits which can occurwhen people in their graduate careers are giventeaching responsibilities in the College.We do not wish either to advocate or to prohibitthe use of graduate students as lecturers. There isactually an irony, possibly even an injustice, inlimiting our discussion to the use of University ofChicago graduate students as teachers in the College. In many instances, our own graduate students are better qualified and certainly betterknown to us than newly-hired instructors whohave not yet completed their degree work and are therefore to be considered graduate students atother institutions. On the general question of policy , then, we can submit only a cautious statementresting on what may appear to be a weakrationale. We believe that benefits may accruefrom the use of graduate students as lecturers andwe shall cite specific examples from various programs. However, we also acknowledge that suchbenefits cannot be assumed to follow automatically from the practice. On one point, however,the committee takes a strong stand: we believethat the use of graduate students in any role inany discipline is justifiable only so far as such usemanifestly improves undergraduate instruction.Under no circumstances should the practice bepermitted to relieve faculty members from theirown teaching responsibilities; nor should it bemotivated by the desire to provide graduate students either with financial support or teachertraining.Scope of Participation of Graduate Students in Undergraduate InstructionData provided the committee reveal that the participation of graduate students in College coursesin one or another of several roles varies greatlyfrom one collegiate division to another, from oneprogram to another within individual divisions, aswell as from one academic year to the next. Theprocess of collecting and analyzing these data reveals a number of problems which ought to beborne in mind by the reader of this report.First, it is crucial to remember that the numbersin the tables included do not reflect the actualnumbers of graduate students employed in anycapacity. Rather, they represent single-quartercourses (or equivalents) in which graduate students were employed. For data included under therubrics "Lecturer," "Course Assistant," or"Lab Assistant," one might conclude that a roughestimate of the actual number of studentsemployed in a given year might be obtained bydividing the total number by three. However, thefigure thus obtained is still unreliable, since thesedata do not permit us to distinguish betweenpart-time graduate-student lecturers, for example,who taught only a single-quarter course, thosewho taught a single three-quarter sequence, andthose (relatively few) students who taught two or111more three-quarter sequences. These distinctionsare very important in attaining a true picture of theoverall contribution of graduate students to College programs, since the degree of commitment ismarkedly different between lecturers who teachonly a single quarter and those who teach an entire sequence.Second, these data alone fail to provide a truepicture in one other important respect: they do notinclude part-time or full-time lecturers who, arenot University of Chicago graduate students, persons who contribute a greater portion of undergraduate instruction in some areas than do ourown graduate students. Since we are concernedmainly with the maintenance of high-quality instruction in the College, we believe that these persons ought to be subject to the same sets ofguidelines we propose to govern the employmentof University of Chicago graduate students. Indeed, a particularly interesting comparison mightbe drawn between those few graduate studentswho teach two or more three-quarter sequences(or whose responsibilities otherwise place them ina nearly full-time status) and their counterpartswho are not University of Chicago graduate students. Although it was not part of our charge to gointo these questions, we suggest that an appropriate agency pursue this question at a later time.Third, it became clear to the committee that nosingle agency of the College has yet had an accurate and complete picture of the actual extent towhich graduate students have been employed inthe College, since nearly every single agency relies primarily on its own payroll figures to ascertain who does what. We have already indicatedhow some important differences become submerged in the data. The problem becomes evenmore difficult as a result of complex patterns ofbudgeting. For example, some graduate- studentlecturers are paid entirely from divisional funds(Czech and South Asian languages, for example);in at least one program (Swedish), first-year instructors are paid by the College while second-year instructors are paid by the division. So longas close communications exist between the deanof the College and the deans of the divisions andmasters of undergraduate divisions, the problemis probably a minor one. However, one can envision a situation in which the dean of the Collegemight remain unaware of the qualifications, if notthe identity, of someone teaching courses takenregularly by significant numbers of undergraduatestudents as part of a College program.Table I opposite lists by academic year the single-quarter courses of equivalents in whichUniversity of Chicago graduate students wereemployed. Tables Ha to Ilf list the same information by administrative units. Tables III and IVgive partial data obtained by the committee for thecurrent academic year, and Table V is appendedmerely to illustrate in some detail the specificcourses assigned to University of Chicagograduate students and those assigned to others aslecturers (both full- and part-time) in one collegiate division.One conclusion may be drawn from all thesedata: neither the distribution nor the numbers ofgraduate students employed as lecturers in theCollege appears to point to a problem of greatmagnitude. If the assumption is true thatgraduate-student lecturers are assigned with fewexceptions to 100-level courses, then it appearsthat their participation in programs of the Collegeamounts to approximately 16 percent of 100-levelcourses and only about 6 percent of all coursesnormally considered to be "College courses."(These figures are based on the estimates of thedean of the College that "of 1,582 courses projected for the College in 1977-78, 985 were'upper-division' courses." The assumption is thatthese figures do not change drastically from oneyear to the next.)Consequently, the committee does not believethat the proportion or the distribution ofgraduate- student teaching is a major problem,even though it is probably true, as the dean of theCollege has suggested, that it is possible for adozen or so students to complete their first year ofCollege study without having a single coursetaught by a regular faculty member.The average number of payments to graduatestudents for single-quarter courses or their equivalents over the past five years is:HCD 37NCD 1PSCD 343SSCD 35BSCD 65Attention is called to the sharp divergence amongdivisions in the pattern of employment (see TablesI and Ha to Ilf). A few graduate students havebeen employed as tutors directly by the College,rather than specific undergraduate divisions: tenin 1975-76, twenty -four in 1976-77, and forty-three in 1977-78. NCD has employed graduatestudents exclusively as course assistants. Amongthe four remaining units, BSCD has employed112TABLE ICourse Lab Course/LabLecturers Assts. Assts. Assts. Tutors Readers .Graders Director Total Unknown1973-74HCD 19 3 9 1 32NCD - 2 2PSCD 43 11 96 5 25 53 1 234SSCD 2 26 33 5BSCD 55 2 4 61College 0Total 64 97 98 9 34 53 1 1 362 51974-75HCD 45 11 1 1 58NCD 1 1PSCD 55 42 91 13 54 27 10 292SSCD 16 25 42 1BSCD 1 53 54College 0Total 117 121 91 13 65 27 11 1 447 11975-76HCD 17 4 2 1 1 25NCD 0PSCD 60 53 97 10 86 38 2 346SSCD 17 30 47BSCD 1 60 2 2 65College 10 10Total 95 147 99 10 98 38 5 1 4931976-77HCD 38 1 39NCD 0PSCD 106 _ 60 94 13 110 41 17 441SSCD 11 27 38BSCD 61 3 4 68College 24 24Total 155 148 97 13 138 41 17 1 6101977-78HCD 25 7 1 1 34NCD 3 3PSCD 84 44 51 13 159 46 6 403SSCD 13 13BSCD 73 2 75College 43 43Total 109 140 51 13 202 46 9 1 571113TABLE Ma: GRADUATE ASSISTANTS— HUMANITIES COLLEGIATE DIVISIONCourse Lab Course/LabYear Lecturers Assts. Assts. Assts. Tutors Readers Graders Directors1973-74 19 3 91974-75 45 11 11975-76 17 4 2 11976-77 381977-78 25 7 1TABLE lib: GRADUATE ASSISTANTS— NEW COLLEGIATE DIVISIONCourse Lab Course/LabYear Lecturers Assts. Assts. Assts. Tutors Readers Graders Directors Unknown1973-74 2 11974-75 11977-78 3TABLE lie: GRADUATE ASSISTANTS— PHYSICAL SCIENCES COLLEGIATE DIVISIONCourse Lab Course/LabYear Lecturers Assts. Assts. Assts. Tutors Readers Graders Directors1973-74 43 11 96 5 25 53 11974-75 55 42 91 13 54 27 101975-76 60 53 97 10 86 38 21976-77 106 60 94 13 110 41 171977-78 84 44 51 13 159 46 6TABLE lid: GRADUATE ASSISTANTS— SOCIAL SCIENCES COLLEGIATE DIVISIONCourse Lab Course/LabYear Lecturers Assts. Assts. Assts. Tutors Readers Graders Unknown1973-74 ¦2 26 51974-75 16 25 11975-76 17 301976-77 11 271977-78 13TABLE He: GRADUATE ASSISTANTS— BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES COLLEGIATE DIVISIONCourse Lab Course/LabYear Lecturers Assts. Assts. Assts. Tutors Readers Graders Unknown1973-74 55 - 2 41974-75 1 531975-76 1 60 2 21976-77 61 3 41977-78 73 2TABLE Ilf: GRADUATE ASSISTANTS— THE COLLEGEYear Lecturers CourseAssts. LabAssts. Course/LabAssts. Tutors Readers Graders1975-761976-771977-78 102443TABLE III: AUTUMN QUARTER 1978Lecturers CourseAssts. LabAssts. Course/LabAssts. Tutors Readers Graders TotalHCDSSCDBSCD 940 17 921TABLE IV: NUMBER OF GRADUATE STUDENTS SERVING IN UNDERGRADUATE COURSES OFFEREDIN THE PHYSICAL SCIENCES COLLEGIATE DIVISION, AUTUMN QUARTER 1978Course LabLecturers Co-Lecturers Assistants Assistants Tutors TotalAstronomy 5 5Chemistry 2 34 36Geophysics 8 8Mathematics 32 3 2 37Physics 29 29Statistics 1 4 5120graduate students as lecturers in only two instances, and has paid between fifty and sixtysingle-quarter equivalencies to course assistants,with occasional instances of payment to lab assistants or graders. SSCD also employs graduatestudents primarily as course assistants, but in theyears 1974-77 paid for between eleven and sixteencourses taught by students as lecturers. In HCD,the primary employment has been as lecturer,with the number of courses varying between seventeen (1975-76) and forty-five (1974-75).- The Physical Sciences Collegiate Divisionstands out from the others because of the sheernumber of course equivalencies paid to graduatestudents: the overall average is markedly higher,but the percentage of courses taught by graduatestudents is not. Approximately 15 to 20 percent ofthe total number of paid-course equivalents werepaid to lecturers (except in 1976-77, when thepercentage approached 25 percent). This division employs students in every major category, and thenumbers of payments to course assistants, lab assistants, and tutors often equals or surpasses thenumbers paid to lecturers. With regard only to thecategory of lecturer, it might be noted that thetrend since 1973 has been to assign higher numbers of courses to graduate students. Although thenumber in 1977-78 was smaller than for the preceding year, it nevertheless remained nearly twiceas high as the number for the years 1973-75. InPSCD, the overwhelming majority of lecturersteach in the Department of Mathematics, whoseprograms will be more fully described below.The Current SituationThe committee sought to collect data for the autumn quarter of 1978-79, concentrating especiallyon the use of graduate students as lecturers. Wehave not attempted to obtain full informationabout other categories of employment.115Data for HCD reveal nine courses whichemployed graduate students as lecturers (seeTable III): seven in 100- and 200-level courses inlanguages, and one each in Music and HumanitiesCore.SSCD reports three sections of Social SciencesCore and one section of Western Civilization weretaught by graduate students. An additional seventeen students were employed as course assistants or laboratory assistants.Data from BSCD indicate that no graduate students were employed as lecturers, and figures forthe other categories were not sought.PSCD (see Table IV) reported 120 courses (orequivalents) in which graduate students wereemployed. Thirty-three fall under the rubric oflecturer, three co-lecturer, forty-five course as sistants and thirty-nine laboratory assistants.Specific departmental assignments are shown inTable IV.RecommendationsAfter considerable debate and reflection, thecommittee has come to the viewpoint thatgraduate students can often achieve not merelythe same level of quality of instruction as theirmore experienced and more learned colleagues,but that in some instances, carefully selectedgraduate students with adequate supervision andguidance are particularly well-suited to provideinstruction of higher quality. Many reasons forthis assertion might be cited, including, of course,the fact of their status as quasi-peers: not only arethey closer in age to their students and thus un-TABLE V: COURSES TAUGHT BY LECTURERS IN HUMANITIES COLLEGIATE DIVISIONAutumn 1977 Winter 1978Uof C UofCGraduate Student Other Graduate Student OtherSwedish 201 ArtDes 101 Swedish 202 ArtDes 221Music 101 (02) ArtDes 211 French 102 (21) ArtDes 270French 101 (21) Greek 204 French 102 (31) Greek 205French 101 (31) Latin 101 French 102 (41) DscHum 244French 101 (41) *Chinese 108 French 102 (61) English 194French 101 (61) *Chinese 208 French 102 (32) *Chinese 109French 101 (32) ^Chinese 308 French 202 (21) ^Chinese 209French 201 (62) ""Japanese 111 French 202 (62) ^Chinese 308Spanish 101 (91) * Japanese 211 Spanish 102 (81) * Japanese 112Spanish 201 (71) * Japanese 3 1 1 Spanish 102 (91) * Japanese 212Czech 201 German 101 (01) Czech 202 (71) * Japanese 312Czech 204 German 101 (03) Czech 205 V German 102 (01)Czech 207 German 201 (01) Czech 208 German 102 (03)SoAsian 253 Swedish 101 SoAsian 254 German 104 (01)Humanities 123 (03) Spanish 202 (71) German 202 (01)French 201 (61) German 212Portuguese 301 Swedish 102Polish 201 Humanities 111 (01)Polish 204 Humanities 124 (03)Humanities 219French 202 (61)Portuguese 302Music 101 (01)Polish 202Polish 205SoAsian 221Totals:14 19 15 26116questionably well-suited to identify with the needsparticular to that maturational stage, but they arethemselves still students and therefore bring totheir teaching assignments a more immediateidentification with the problems of students. Inaddition, they often remember the specific problems of learning the very material they are nowteaching and are consequently sometimes moresensitive to the problems of the learner.In spite of these very obvious advantages, themore important factor may really be the professional context in which graduate students function. Unfortunately, regular faculty members insome areas occasionally regard the teaching ofelementary material as a somewhat onerous burden, or, if not, at best a task which they haveperformed many times over. The graduate stu dents, on the other hand, regard the experience astheir first really professional activity. It has oftenbeen observed that they approach their teachingresponsibilities with a zest, zeal, and desire tosucceed which others of us cannot hope to recapture.Furthermore, if we compare graduate studentsteaching elementary language courses, for example, with assistant professors on one hand, andwith senior faculty on the other, we find two additional important differences. Given the University's criteria for promotion to tenure, assistantprofessors are often aware that devoted and successful performance of teaching assignments atthis level, though they may enhance the probability of promotion, are nevertheless far less important than either scholarly research or teachingTABLE V {continued)Spring 1978 Autumn 1978Uof C Uof CGraduate Student Other Graduate Student OtherSwedish 203 ArtDes 201 Humanities 101 ArtDes 212Music 101 (02) ArtDes 271 Music 101 (01) ArtDes 221French 103 (21) DscHum 245 French 101 (32) ^Chinese 108French 103 (31) * Japanese 113 French 101 (61) ^Chinese 208French 103 (61) * Japanese 213 Spanish 101 (11) * Japanese 111French 103 (32) ^Chinese 110 Spanish 101 (91) * Japanese 211French 203 (21) ^Chinese 210 Spanish 201 (71) German 101 (01)Spanish 103 (81) German 103 (01) Czech 201 German 101 (03)Spanish 103 (91) German 103 (03) Czech 204 German 201 (01)Czech 203 German 105 (01) Swedish 101Czech 206 German 203 (01) Swedish 201Czech 209 German 213 Humanities 105 (02)SoAsian 255 Swedish 103 Humanities 105 (05)Humanities 125 (03) Humanities 110(03)Music 102 (01) Humanities 110(05)French 203 (61) Humanities 123 (02)Portuguese 303 Humanities 218Polish 203 French 101 (21)Polish 206 French 101 (31)SoAsian 222 French 101 (41)SoAsian 225 French 201 (61)Portuguese 301Polish 201Polish 204Totals:13 21 9 24*Courses co-taught with regular faculty members.117more advanced courses. Thus, for these personsand others in similar positions, there is a verystrong tension between their teaching responsibilities and the expectations implicit in thecriteria for promotion to tenure. Furthermore, assistant professors share with their senior colleagues the considerable distraction of many additional administrative responsibilities not directlyrelated to teaching or research.The clearest evidence for the ability of graduatestudents to perform successfully as teachers in theCollege comes from their participation in certainstaff-taught courses. The committee has identifiedcertain features of some staff-taught courseswhich make them particularly appropriate to theemployment of graduate students as teachers.First, in courses like elementary languages andmathematics, it is possible for younger persons toattain a sufficient degree of mastery of a clearlydefined or easily circumscribed subject matter.Second, it is often possible in courses of this typeto identify, codify, and demonstrate to beginningteachers specific teaching strategies andtechniques and thereby provide them with an effective approach as a pedagogical underpinningwhich will help to compensate for their lack ofexperience.Even though other staff-taught courses like corecourses in humanities and social sciences are lesseasily managed in this sense, we know from experience that the careful and limited employmentof graduate students as teachers can be undertaken with reasonable expectation of success solong as the regular faculty accept the responsibility for supervising the efforts of the graduate students and safeguarding the interests of their undergraduate charges, and especially for providingencouragement and guidance. We believe thatcommon reading lists and examinations imposeone kind of guidance and control and that attendance at regular staff meetings provides anothertype. We shall suggest additional means of providing guidance arid control below.These advantages convince the committee thatgraduate students may make similar contributionsin contexts in which they have not yet been used.We encourage the faculty to consider innovativeways in which graduate students might enhance instruction in the College.At the same time, we recommend that proponents of such new programs be required to demonstrate to the satisfaction of an oversight agencythat proposed programs are fully consonant withthe principles and spirit underlying the guidelinesoutlined in this paper. Further, we wish to stress that we do not seek to urge the employment ofgraduate students by any particular department orstaff; we do not wish to appear to suggest eitherthat graduate students ought or ought not to beemployed. We do wish to persuade faculties toopen the entire question of their use to fresh deliberation? and we do specifically encourage thecautious trial of graduate students in new areas.Our belief in the possible advantages which canbe realized from the employment of graduate students should not allow us to lose sight of our reservations. We cannot stress strongly enough thesingle criterion underlying any and all uses ofgraduate students as teachers: the demonstrableenhancement of instruction. We repeat our viewthat lectureships in the College are not to be regarded as a form of financial aid for graduate students or as a means of freeing regular faculty fromtheir own teaching responsibilities.We believe it is essential for both faculty andgraduate students to understand that graduatestudents without faculty status cannot beemployed in any capacity in which their role in theclassroom or laboratory is a totally autonomousone. Certain responsibilities reside with the regular faculty and cannot be delegated, including decisions about course content, goals, reading lists,grading policies, syllabi, and similar questions.Ideally, regular faculty and graduate-student lecturers ought to share in such decisions, and part ofthe process of selecting graduate students asteachers ought to include the identification of personal characteristics compatible with this goal.A number of programs might be held up asmodels for emulation, even though specific detailswill vary according to exigencies from one discipline to another; As examples of programs fortraining and supervision which have proven successful in the past, we point to the carefullyplanned program currently existing in the Department of Mathematics and to the program usedin German a few years ago. The former shows thepossibilities in a large department strongly committed to excellence in teaching; the latter is anexample of the same kind of commitment in asmall department in which the major responsibilities fall on the shoulders of but a few facultymembers. Both programs provide for extendedtraining in methods of teaching the subject prior tothe employment as teachers; both provide forconcurrent supervision, both in the sense of supportive guidance and of control; and both providefor informal evaluation, both of individualgraduate students and of the program as a whole.One important phase of both of these programs118has been used successfully in other disciplines. Inthe "teaching internship" approach, a graduatestudent is assigned to a single faculty member forat least a full quarter, observes the regular facultymember teaching the class, assists in the preparation of teaching materials, and actually engages inlimited teaching under the direct guidance andsupervision of the faculty member.The committee recommends that these or similar kinds of training and supervision be providedfor in any program utilizing graduate students andthat graduate students be excused from suchtraining only under the most extraordinary circumstances (e.g., many years of previous successful teaching experience). It is to be notedespecially that the two programs mentioned abovecall for the direct and constant supervision ofgraduate students while they are employed. Thecommittee does not find supervison in absentia tobe consonant with these recommendations.The committee recognizes that subjects likemathematics or elementary languages permitmore readily the identification of methodologicalor pedagogical principles of organization, presentation, and evaluation than do some other disciplines. We offer for consideration the notion ofattempting to identify or define a "pedagogy" appropriate to these other disciplines. We believethe College and the University are uniquely endowed with distinguished scholars and teacherswell equipped to address these questions, especially in certain areas which have received butlittle attention outside of this University. Ourcommitment to and our experience in teaching bydiscussion, for example, places us in a uniqueposition to discuss this teaching mode and, without attempting to define a single "right" way to goabout the task, to provide teachers with an overview of practices which have been successful forothers. Our special student body similarly puts usin a unique position to consider the techniquesand approaches particularly well- or ill-suited toteaching "gifted" students.We recommend the establishment of a forumfor the discussion of pedagogical questions in thebroadest possible sense, a forum not limited according to disciplines or by numbers, in which allinterested faculty members could participate andto which interested teachers could turn for helpwith any question or problem touching on theirteaching. The forum might also serve as an auxiliary component of an individual department'steacher-training program, a source whichgraduate students currently employed or underconsideration for employment might be required to utilize. Such a cross-disciplinary forum couldhelp to remind teachers that various approacheswork well under various conditions and to providea broad pedagogical perspective from which to regard one's own discipline. It would further help toachieve some very important goals in the trainingof graduate students as teachers: to evaluate various pedagogical problems and techniques, tobegin to formulate a pedagogical viewpoint, and todevelop the pedagogical style best suited to one'sdiscipline and individual personality. Such an interdisciplinary setting would further enablegraduate students and faculty to give thought andattention to the total curriculum and the place oftheir respective disciplines within it. We believethat these objectives are most readily attainedwhen beginning teachers are exposed to a varietyof approaches and when they are given ampleroom for growth.The foregoing discussion touches on a very important implication of the decision to employgraduate students as teachers. We stress againthat neither the welfare of graduate students northat of regular faculty is a primary considerationin this decision. We stress further that the primaryreason for our insistence on training programs, inwhatever form, is to ensure quality of instructionin the College and thus to safeguard the interestsof undergraduate students.Nevertheless, we believe that the University,the College, and those departments and programswhich employ graduate students assume an obligation to provide them with something beyondmerely teaching experience and salary. It is incumbent upon us to assure that the teaching experience will be maximally beneficial to thegraduate students and to their undergraduatecharges and to avoid the mere exploitation ofgraduate students.The committee further suggests that new assistant professors and especially non-student lecturers with limited teaching experience be encouraged or required to avail themselves of the samesupport provided our graduate students, not onlywithin individual departments and programs butwithin the context of the proposed forum. We believe it is appropriate to demand as much of non-students with little teaching experience as we demand of our graduate-student teachers.We recommend the following guidelines in regard to criteria for (a) the approval of proposedprograms utilizing graduate students as teachersand (b) the selection of individual graduate students as teachers.We would oppose strongly a proposed program119which failed to provide for some form of drainingand supervision consonant with the examples already cited. We recommend the abolition of programs which fail to live up to expectations or failto meet the obligations implicit in our recommendations.With regard to the selection of individualgraduate students, we recommend that selectionalcriteria focus on qualities directly pertinent tosuccessful classroom teaching at the undergraduate level. We do not wish to appear tosuggest that scholarly ability and teaching abilityare mutually exclusive. We do wish to stress,however, that scholarly ability alone is insufficient, in our view, to justify employing agraduate student to teach in the College. Conversely, we would oppose very strongly the practice of reserving potential teaching positions in theCollege for those graduate students whose departments deem them unworthy of other kinds offinancial support. We recommend that criteria forselection be nearly as stringent as those normallyused in hiring assistant professors or Harper Fellows, keeping in mind the specific and exclusivepurpose of employment of graduate students.It must be clearly understood that the- essentialdifference between our use of graduate studentsand typical TA programs stems from three facts.First, few graduate students in a department canexpect to teach in the College, and therefore,teaching positions cannot be used as an enticement in recruiting students. Second, the numberof graduate students in a department can in noway be permitted to force a compromise in ourhigh standards of selection; the absence of highlyqualified students in the pool at any time will demand that none be hired. Finally, the major portion of undergraduate teaching will continue to beperformed by regular faculty.The committee recommends that provision bemade for the systematic monitoring of the use ofgraduate students as teachers in the College.Monitoring should take into account at least threeaspects. First, an appropriate agency shouldevaluate according to stringent criteria thequalifications of candidates recommended by departments and staffs and make recommendationsto the dean of the College. Second, proposals forprograms utilizing graduate students as teachersshould be evaluated in accordance with the recommendations cited elsewhere in this report.Third, appropriate agencies or persons shouldmonitor programs utilizing graduate studentsthrough written student evaluations, by conferringwith as many sources as possible (graduate-student teachers, supervising faculty members, undergraduate students in courses taught bygraduate students, advisers in the College, studentadvisory boards, divisional masters, etc.) and,where appropriate and feasible, by undertakingcontrolled comparisons between course sections,courses, or programs utilizing graduate studentsas teachers and those which do not use them.The committee finds itself in disagreement onthe question of the locus of oversight andmonitoring. If divisional masters properly exercise their authority and agree with the spirit ofthese recommendations, and if all departmentsand staffs wishing to utilize graduate students asteachers adhere to the spirit and substance ofthese recommendations, we believe that the ordinary procedures governing appointments wouldsufficiently meet most of our guidelines. Somemembers of the committee believe that the oversight function should not be centralized, butrather left to the individual departments and undergraduate divisions.Others believe that some central oversight bodyresponsible directly to the dean of the Collegeought to be established to carry out these recommendations. Those who hold this view believethat a centralized agency, composed of facultymembers from various divisions and departments,would permit an interdisciplinary perspectivewhich decentralized oversight would not, andwould provide a single locus in which a generaloverview of the use of graduate students would beattained. Under a decentralized system, no onegroup can easily evaluate the total effect of the useof graduate students on College programs. Stillothers believe that these responsibilities should beaddressed jointly by individual departments anddivisions, on the one hand, and by a central authority.In view of the advisory nature of our charge, wepresent these conflicting views and recommendthat the dean of the College decide on the bestadministrative solution to this problem from hisspecial perspective.In addressing the question of the use ofgraduate students in the College, the committeehas dealt with a matter which touches on traditions and policies felt by many to be among themost fundamental at this university. The committee has mentioned certain other questionswhich lie beyond the scope of its charge but whichare nevertheless intertwined with the main question. We have mentioned, for example, the problem of assuring high quality of instruction inclasses taught by non-faculty persons who are notUniversity of Chicago graduate students.A second such question intimately related to120our primary concern — the maintenance of a highquality of instruction — is class size. In spite of ourinsistence on the enhancement of instruction asthe sole criterion governing the employment ofgraduate students, we recognize that class sizeaffects, if not necessarily the quality of instruction, at least the substance of instruction: smallclasses permit certain kinds of teaching modeswhich larger classes do not permit.The committee chooses not to consider thisquestion in detail. The committee's position isthat the question of the use of graduate studentsmust first be decided in principle and on its ownmerits without considering arguments based onexpediency or pragmatic concerns, as sound asthey may be in a wider context. Indeed, it is notclear to the committee to what extent the effectsof small class size per se have been shown to enhance instruction and learning in general. To giveit undue prominence is to suggest that it may beused as justification for the employment ofgraduate students in order to enhance instruction,an argument which the committee specifically eschews.Finally, it has become clear that the definitionof a "College course" is of fundamental importance in determining just to what degree the College or one of its agencies has direct responsibilityfor monitoring the substance and quality in a givencourse. Our working definition rests not on administrative or fiscal considerations, but on curricular ones. For the purposes of this report, wedefine a College course as any course regularlytaken by undergraduate students to fulfill a requirement for an undergraduate degree.This raises serious questions about the locus ofresponsibility for the summer quarter. If the University and the College continue to stress thesummer quarter as the "fourth, regular academicquarter" and to encourage full-time undergraduate students to take advantage of summer-quarter offerings, then the summer program, fromthe curricular perspective, clearly falls into thedomain of "College courses," even though theadministrative responsibility lies primarily in theUniversity Extension Division. It is especiallyimportant to note that none of the data obtained todate include summer quarters.Respectfully submitted,Mark AshinDaniel GarberEugene GoldwasserRobert D. Hummel, ChairmanWilliam H. MeyerRichard Taub Graduate Assistants — Explanation of Their DutiesBiological Sciences Collegiate DivisionLecturers: Lecturers have complete responsibilityfor the conduct of the course.Course Assistants and Laboratory Assistants:Duties vary from course to course, but the majority of course and laboratory assistants do the following:1. read/grade exams and make up exam questions (i.e., submit their suggestions to the instructor who is free to accept or decline);2. read/grade papers and select or contributepaper topics;3. deliver occasional lectures under the directsupervision of the instructor, lead and participate in discussion sessions both during regularclass periods and during extra hours arrangedbetween instructor and students;4. do all aspects of laboratory work in thoseclasses having labs such as setting up andcleaning up the materials, making up experiments, and assisting students with these andother experiments;5. special duties of course assistants in certaincourses include proctoring exams, assisting inall aspects of weekend field trips, reading andpregrading lab reports, and acting as field leaders for some of the students in a certain class.Tutors: The tutors employed in 1976-77 assistedstudents in the common year with writing problems.Graders: Graders are responsible for gradingexams, papers, etc.Humanities Collegiate DivisionLecturers: Lecturers are responsible for all aspects of the course. Lecturers in this collegiatedivision have been employed primarily in thecommon core and elementary language courseswhich are staff taught. They are, therefore, underthe supervision of the staff chairman.Course Assistants: Contribute to class discussion,deliver occasional lectures, grade papers and/orexams. All of these activities are conducted underthe direct supervision of the course instructor.Tutors: Assist with writing problems of bothfreshmen (in the common core) and up-perclassmen.Graders: Grade exams.Director: Directs the University Chorus.New Collegiate DivisionCourse Assistants: Round up texts, see to duplication of materials for staff meetings, and keeptrack of the assignment of students to sections.121Physical Sciences Collegiate DivisionLecturers: Lecturers have complete responsibilityfor the conduct of a course. Graduate studentswho serve as lecturers gain experience in classroom teaching with the support and guidance ofthe department faculty.Course Assistants, Laboratory Assistants,Course ILab Assistants: Duties for these positionsvary from course to course but would include thefollowing: correcting quizzes and homeworkproblems, guiding students in the laboratories,and conducting recitation or discussion sessions.Each graduate assistant meets regularly with theinstructor to discuss homework, exams, andgrading. At this time he can present suggestionsand comments. During this meeting the instructortakes his assistants into the laboratory where theyinspect the equipment to be used for the experiment in the following week. At that time a briefexplanation will be given to the assistants by thecourse instructor and/or a staff member familiarwith the experiment. After this presentation, it isthe duty of each assistant to become proficientwith the experiment by actually doing it, recording data, and writing notes in the notebook.In the laboratory, each assistant is responsiblefor his group of about twenty students throughoutthe quarter by giving demonstrations on the usageof the equipment and assisting the studentwhenever needed. The graduate assistant is responsible for collecting the data reports andgrading them. He is also responsible for maintaining accurate records of attendance and grades.In the Department of Statistics, laboratory assistants are referred to as either senior or juniorassistants. Their duties are as follows:Senior Assistants: They are under close supervision of a faculty member, assume responsibilityfor a major portion of teaching a course. They learn by observation and participation how to puta course together, from initial preparation throughgrading the final exam. Ultimately, the successfulsenior assistant will prepare, discuss with the instructor, revise, and deliver one or more lecturesin class.Junior Assistants: Under the direction of thecourse instructor, they grade homework, preparesolutions, and hold office hours. Junior assistantsmay be asked to attend lectures to observe teaching techniques, to grade an exam question, or toattend problem sessions and to present the solution (prepared in advance) to one or twohomework problems under the professor's supervision.Tutors: Assist students in their weak areas.Readers: Correct the daily homework papers,grade them, and maintain up-to-date records ofthese grades for each student. They also report totheir instructors any special weakness revealed byan assignment, any problem that appears to beparticularly difficult, etc. Each section of undergraduate mathematics has a reader assigned to it.Graders: Grade exams and, in some cases,homework.Social Sciences Collegiate DivisionLecturers: Lecturers have complete responsibilityfor the conduct of the course. Most lecturers participate in staff-taught courses (i.e., commoncore, Western civilization).Course Assistants: At the direction of the instructor, course assistants do some of the following things: Assist in laboratory sessions, prepareweekly problems sets, prepare and assemble visual materials, grade quizzes, prepare reading lists,and confer with students on reading lists, papertopics, and computer problems. They also assistin class discussions and hold office hours.122ANNUAL REPORT OFTHE STUDENT MENTAL HEALTH CLINIC, 1977-1978April 15, 1979Complaining of life's indistinctness, five undergraduate women drugged themselves with opiumin order to understand more sympathetically DeQuincey's Dreams. They found it difficult to haveany "experiences" since all of their time wasspent in preparation, in routine, and in sleep. On along weekend, at intervals, they solemnly consumed packets of the white powder but no mentalreorientation took place. The suspense and theexcitement did not even permit them to growsleepy.In her account one student wrote, "About fouro'clock on that weird afternoon, the young instructor whom we had been obliged to take intoour confidence grew alarmed over the whole performance, took away our De Quincey and all ofthe remaining powders, administered an emetic toeach of the five aspirants for sympathetic understanding of all human experience, and sent us toour separate rooms with the stern command toappear at family worship after supper, 'Whetherwe were able to or not'."The incident occurred about one hundred yearsago and the nineteen-year-old writer, Jane Ad-dams, a year or two later received one of the firstB.A. degrees from Rockford Women's College.With a classmate, she travelled for several yearsthrough Europe, returning to find an old house inthe inner city of Chicago to live among poorpeople, sharing their plight and improving theneighborhood. She became the first inspector ofalleys and streets, concerned with garbage removal and the improvement of sanitary conditions. Over the course of the years, through themany vital young adults and older civic leadersshe attracted, innovative changes flowed to thecity in daycare nurseries, a more humane approach to juvenile delinquency, and a great variety of improvements relating to family care andworking conditions of wage earners.These earlier attempts at the solution of persistent social problems have echoes in the present.We have long known that social milieu and socialmovements have a profound effect on adolescentsand young adults, who, in turn, have an impactupon society. It is the fashion these days to viewyouth as selfishly absorbed in improving conditions for themselves, in looking to their own im mediate needs. Rigid controls and regulationsupon their behavior, common in an earlier century, are absent now and there are thus greaterdemands upon young people to attempt to establish a firm set of goals and ideals within themselves.The undergraduate years of preparation providean opportunity for students to gather into themselves the strength needed to accomplish thetransition from the tasks of adolescence to thoseof young adulthood. This requires an intense absorption in learning more about their aspirations,their needs, and their abilities and thus forces students to turn their attention inward. At the sametime they must vigorously test out their ideas withtheir peers, their mentors and shape their talentsand skills through the great fields of intellectualinquiry to which they are exposed.In this our twenty-third report to the Universitycommunity, we will examine trends in clinic usefor the academic year 1977-78 and preview1978-79 by a comparison of the fall quarters of1977 and 1978.As we seek to respond to the needs of undergraduates and graduates who consult us, we continue to relate high clinic users to their proportionate registration on campus. Through sharingtheir concerns and our own with faculty and administration, attention can be directed to relievingundue institutional stress leading to improvementin the conditions of living and learning.Preview of 1978-79Continuing a trend which emerged in the fallquarter of 1977, clinic use by first-year undergraduates has been at the lowest point in the history of the clinic. This is more remarkable in thatthe current class increased by almost 100 students. We do not know whether this low profilewill hold true for the entire year since it has been aconsistent finding for over two decades that 10percent of an entering class will come to the clinicby the end of their first year; another 10 percentwill come to us in their second year. This was truefor the class of 1980 which also had a low profileinitially, but by the end of their first year, 10 percent had come to the clinic in need of a specialresponse to their doubts, fears, and longings.Clinic use by undergraduates generally hascontinued to hold to 40 percent of the clinic123population or only 10 percent above their proportionate carnpus registration. In previous years, wehave examined the admission ratings of selectedundergraduate classes to determine whether clinicusers differed from nonusers in academic standingand personal qualities at the time of entrance. Forthe classes of 1966 and 1967, we found nosignificant difference in admission ratings. We expected that fewer clinic users would graduate infour years, because of the intrusion of emotionaldifficulties and that more would drop out. Insteadwe found that in the classes of 1966 and 1967fewer clinic users dropped out and more continued for a late graduation. We emphasized atthat time that treatment was relatively brief formost and continuation in school was not associated with being in therapy for long intervals.Nevertheless, there were a number who had beenencouraged to leave school in order to undertaketreatment and returned to graduate.Repeating this study after a decade, we foundthat students who entered the University in 1972and 1973 with an expected date of graduation in1976 and 1977 once again reflected no significantdifference in admission ratings for clinic users andnonusers. At this point, however, clinic users inthese classes are lagging behind nonusers ingraduation rates. If our experience with earlierclasses holds true, more clinic users will continuein the University and, of those who dropped out, alarger percentage of clinic users than nonuserswill return to graduate.Another emerging trend appears to be exceptionally high clinic use by matriculants in thegraduate divisions and professional schools. Atthe close of the fall quarter of 1977, the numberswere double their proportionate campus registration. By fall 1978 they had increased by another 12percent. Last year we reported that graduatewomen used the clinic at a rate higher than theirproportionate numbers in the University; the fallquarter 1978 continues the trend for an evenhigher use of the clinic services by women.Although for the past academic year clinic useby blacks was exactly that of their proportionatecampus registration, at the end of the fall quarter1978 black 'students had equalled the numberswho came to the clinic duririg the academic year1977-78. We do not have reason to believe thatincreasing use by black students is evidence of ahigher incidence of emotional difficulty.Graduate Matriculants_The swelling number pf graduate matriculants inthe clinic population has absorbed our attention. There is a subtle interplay between externalsocietal pressure and intrapsychic pressure. Ourconcern is that we identify external conditionsthat may intensify the anxieties young adults experience in making a transition to graduate workat this University. It is well known that opportunities in .certain fields are shrinking rapidly ordisappearing for all but a very few. Students whohave completed a degree in one field are returningto equip themselves for another profession. Thereis no assurance that with the rapid changes insociety the careers these returning students selectwill have permanence. Thus students experiencean erosion of confidence despite very high attainments and competence. ,A second factor we have earlier reported is that,as we search for new approaches to old problemsor seek to define newly emerging fields, many ofour divisions and schools are in the process ofreview and redirection. To this is added thespiralling cost of education and of living expenses,a problem for faculty, administration, and students. Beset by doubts and uncertain of what direction the future may take, it is understandablethat mentors become absorbed and seemingly unavailable to students. Perhaps, too, there is a needto protect ourselves from becoming too caught upin the problems these young people confront.Clearly we cannot, nor should we, be in theposition of assuring a successful outcome to thepursuit of study in a given field. It is questionablewhether all but a very few students seek such assurance from us. But it is our experience that formany students a concerned interest and more frequent, even brief, contacts with their mentors willgo far in averting unnecessary pain and immobilization. There is a difference between necessarysolitude students require for the process of defining a field of research and presenting it forexamination and the experience of intense loneliness and isolation. The latter robs students of thevigor required to pursue their work in shapingideas, ordering and absorbing facts. It is our experience that providing more contacts with incoming students spaced over their first year iscrucial to their well-being.Virginia Woolf, in an entry in one of her diaries,describes herself as "parched for praise." Although some students do present themselves inthis fashion, for many it is not praise they seek butrecognition that they are toilers in a commonscholarly endeavor at a time of scarcity. Knowingsomething of their aspirations and goals, sharingrealities with them in a candid fashion, may provide a sense of support and understanding. This in124itself will enable many students to endure uncertainties and work more productively to find creative solutions for themselves.Perhaps the most frequent complaint we hearfrom newcomers is the absence of a meeting placewhich cuts across divisions and schools. Althoughthere are many such places scattered through theUniversity area, and, on any given day, enoughevents and activities are listed in the Maroon to filla week of evenings, these students have oftencome from small private colleges or major stateuniversities where they have had such a facility.They believe that it would provide a sense ofcommunity. Yet it is astonishing to discover howmany will more resourcefully use the facilitiesavailable following an experience of knowing thattheir mentors are aware of them as students andvalue their presence on campus.Of Women and MenIn the past, we have attributed higher clinic use bywomen to the general belief and data from studies,our own included, that society permits women toseek help more readily. More recent data suggest,however, that both clinically and based on generalsymptoms of sadness, women do have a higherincidence of difficulty than men.Almost sixty years ago, Virginia Woolf tooksharp issue with Desmond MacCarthy's review ofOur Women by Arnold Bennett in which Mac-Carthy largely sustained Bennett's view that manis the superior of woman intellectually and creatively. Woolf took further issue with his positionthat the mind of woman is not "sensibly affectedby education and liberty." She replied, ". . . it isnot only education but liberty of experience whichis crucial, that [women] be able to differ from menwithout fear and express their differences openly. . . that there will always be in existence a nucleus of women who think, invent, imagine, andcreate as freely as men do and with as little fear ofridicule and condescension."Though she was later to expand her ideas in ARoom of One's Own, Woolf here expressed herhope for only a nucleus of women so equipped andfreed. Although the clinic experience is with thatnucleus of women who have elected to study ingraduate or professional fields at this University,we believe that many of the experiences they describe are common at other institutions. Writingmuch more recently, M. F. Ashley Montagucommented, "The doubts women have of themselves are man-made and most women are so enslaved to the myths of their own inferiority theyare unable to see the truth for the myth." Both sexes contend with myths. When the fables spun for or about them in childhood, buttressed by cautionary tales, are suddenly exposedto an inescapable flash of reality, they feel smalland enfeebled and at such times may seek ourhelp. That women come to us at double the rate ofmen cannot be explained by the assumption thatthey are experiencing greater difficulty in achieving an academic goal. Academic problems do notarise with greater frequency among women.Woolf, replying to the frequently remarked absence of women among the great artists and scientists throughout the ages, wrote, "I think weshall agree that women from the earliest times tothe present day have brought forth the entirepopulation of the universe. This occupation hastaken much time and strength. It has also broughtthem into subjection to men, and, incidentally — ifthat were to the point — bred in them some of themost lovable and admirable qualities of the race."She contended that before there could be a Newton, for example, there must have been many lesser Newtons among women.We would say that there is a long road aheadbefore women are represented in adequate numbers in the arts, business, political office, the professions and in the administration and faculties ofuniversities. But while this imbalance is beingrighted, some women continue to struggle with asense of subjection. To this is added a uniqueproblem which must be individually confrontedand resolved.What is unique for women is a biological clocklimiting their childbearing years which cannot bealtered, at least at this point of our knowledgeabout the human organism. And it is perhaps because of this that the problems of women emergeas they seek to join that "nucleus of women" forwhom there can be both freedom of education andof experience, a nucleus which is expanding toinclude larger and larger numbers.Increasingly we have seen women for whom thechoice of a profession has been a long-held goal,intensely pursued; they were given rewardingacknowledgment of their scholarly attainments.The choice of a relationship, however, has beencasually entered upon or deferred. Although thisis equally true for men, the pleasure such freedomprovides, commonly described as "going with theflow," "staying focused on each other as long as itworks out," appears to exact a great toll uponsome women. Words bravely asserted often maskold needs, and there emerges deep longing for afamily coupled with despair that the opportunitynow seems at risk. They lose interest in their125work, are lonely, and question their ability to develop personal relationships. They may attempt toovercome such feelings by seeking new partnersin the desperate hope that this will heal a torn self.Those women who have had partners with whomthey have established an expectation of permanence and family grieve over the pain of abandonment. Men are not immune from such experiences, but there is a special biological poignancyfor women whose child-bearing years have beenforeshortened by the length of time spent inshaping a career. When we have been able to absorb their pain and bewilderment, women haveoften, then, been able to recognize their longingfor a more permanent relationship and to find renewed strength in a more candid understanding oftheir needs and wishes, to re-engage themselveswith zest in learning.Men and women alike come to us with problemseddying from old losses, old fears which now intrude upon their current agenda and give rise toanxiety, depression, immobilization in theirstudies. The interruption of an important relationship may precipitate a profound sense of emptiness, even when it has been one fraught withdifficulty.It is uncanny to observe the capacity of an individual, longing for closeness, to select someonewho is incapable of providing such closeness, repeating an earlier relationship with an unresponsive, emotionally distant parent. Some men andwomen appear to suffer from an inability to askfor support and to overemphasize independenceeven when the need for emotional support isreasonable. Others cling in a burdensome manner.For when relationships which have been enteredupon early to ease separation from families aresevered, then there are old problems to be newlyfaced. Such experiences are common to bothsexes.We have in an earlier report recognized that, atthis period of economic uncertainty, the shrinkingjob market necessitates settling for lesser goals;what had seemed like an opening of wide vistasfor experimentation is abruptly cut off , and theymust confront the reality that even in the mostexciting endeavors there is-drudgery. When theseyoung women are in relationships which aremeaningful to them and of some permanence,there are issues of whose work will take precedence. Frustration, rage, old hurts expressed invindictive behavior must be relieved and overcome so that a decision, when reached, will not bedestructive. An important missing element at times appears to be the capacity for pairs to function in a mutually supportive manner.To balance career and family, to share bothstrain and pleasure with a partner, continues to bethe unique task confronting two-career familiesand it still falls more heavily upon women. Wehave se%n many ingenious solutions to theseproblems and many genuine accommodationsbased on mutual respect and caring. Despite thewidely described decline of the family, the needfor relationship, for family, is deep and intense.We have observed weariness with shallow encounter, corrosive doubt on the part of some students as to their capacity to engage and holdanother in a mutually responsive relationship, andwith this to find a meaningful career or vocationalgoal.The Clinic ExperienceWhat is it then that we can offer through clinicintervention to students, close to seven hundredwho seek our help yearly? Since the inception ofthe clinic in 1956, we have seen some 9,000 adolescents and young adults with problems rangingfrom temporary disturbance to severe impairmentin functioning and in the will to live. Some wehave known only fleetingly, others intensively andin depth. For some our work was minimal and atbest ineffective.We regret that others, for reasons of their own,did not use our services; they might have beenhelped. We do know that with some students ourintervention was life-preserving. They have goneon into many professions; some have completedcreative research which has increased man'sknowledge about himself. Our work with studentscovers a broad spectrum. Severely stressful family circumstances may erode the capacity of someyoung people to manage their affairs. Otherscontend with old frustrations and conflicts. Theyimpart to us their painful experiences, their fears,their anxieties. Without intrusiveness, we absorbtheir stress, offering them time to examine theirbehavior, their wishes, their needs. In achieving adeepening and strengthening capacity for self-observation, for monitoring their own needs, fordefining their own standards and values, they findrenewed vigor to establish their own course ofaction. This leads them to feel better about themselves and, with an increased sense of well-being,renewed energy to complete old tasks and reachout for new goals. Should conflict arise in the future, they have new understanding of old problems and, with opportunity to return according to126need, they can try out their new understandingand approach old issues in a new way.Myth, Fable, and Cautionary TaleThe young people whose lives we have beenprivileged to share have taught us much abouttheir needs, ourselves, the University as a settingfor living and learning, the nature and quality ofthe society in which our lives are imbedded. Intimes of great social change such as are upon ustoday, students seem to be weaving new myths,writing new fables, devising new cautionary tales.And yet they must still distinguish between mythand reality, between fable and history, betweencautionary tale and genuine danger, genuine reward. It is a tribute to the resiliency of the humanorganism that large dragons may be overcome byincremental bits of understanding and effort.Emotional dragons within oneself which bar theway to one's goal, whether in academic achievement or personal relationships, may yield even asthe monsters blocking the way to success yield tothe small hero one encounters in endless fables.Cautionary tales derived from the experiences ofothers may be advisory, but the basic task remains to shape one's own skills and talents derived from a clearer knowledge of oneself. Taleswhich immobilize and inhibit can be courageouslyexposed, removing crippling doubt and yieldingnew understanding about oneself and the courageto explore it.Five- Year TrendStatistical tables covering a five year span onwhich this report is based are available upon request. Clinic use increased to seventy-six perthousand students, a trend which was reported forthe fall quarter 1977. Eight percent of the studentbody used clinic services: ten percent were undergraduates, seven percent were graduates. Bothgraduate women and graduate newcomers made use of the clinic at a rate much higher than theirproportionate enrollment. Sixteen percent of theclinic population was referred to the OutpatientDepartment of Psychiatry, other clinics, and toprivate therapy.This is our final report in the present form. Dr.Kramer has become head of the Student HealthService, and I anticipate that future reports willencompass a broad range of activities in our workwith students. Physical illness, illness induced bylifestyle, the emotional difficulties which flowfrom such lifestyle, and the reverse — emotionalproblems which create debilitating lifestyle — cannow have greater attention. And I will be retiringin June with a sense of privilege stemming frommy association with students, colleagues, faculty,and administration whose companionship hasbeen an enriching experience.John F. KramerMiriam ElsonClinic StaffPsychiatristsPeter B. JohnstonJohn F. KramerMorton M. SilvermanPsychiatric Social WorkersJeannette BranchMiriam ElsonAlice IchikawaBetty KohutThayer LindnerElizabeth Loken (since 10178)Anna Mary WallaceSecretaryJanice Coles127THE UNIVERSITY'S INSTITUTIONAL PATENT AGREEMENTWITH THE DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH,EDUCATION AND WELFARETo: Deans, Department Chairmen, DirectorsFrom: D. Gale Johnson, ProvostApril 20, 1979I am pleased to inform you that the University hasnow secured an Institutional Patent Agreementwith the Department of Health, Education andWelfare. This agreement enables the University toretain title to inventions made under HEW sponsorship. Formerly, in order to retain such rights,the University had to submit individual petitionsfor waiver for each invention, which was burdensome, took an inordinate amount of time, and wasnot always successful. The new agreement places a few additional requirements on the University and its faculty andstaff. The principal additional requirement is thatprincipal investigators acknowledge in writing theobligation that all staff have as a condition of appointment, namely that any inventions arising outof University activities are covered by the University statutes.Procedures for observing the new requirementare detailed in the enclosed memorandum fromCedric L. Chernick. We will appreciate yourcooperation.(continued on page 131)EXHIBIT ATHE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGOSTATEMENT TO ACCOMPANY APPLICATION FORCONTRACT, GRANT OR AWARDTO (Sponsoring Agency or Organization)PROPOSAL TITLE:PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR(S): (Please type)(D : (2) * (3) DATE: _/_ J.The Principal Investigator(s) understand that any invention made or discovered by the Principal Investigators) or other staff in the course of activities encompassed by this application is subject to the termsof the University contract," grant or award document and rights shall be assigned and processed inaccordance with the University Statute on patents now in effect. The Principal Investigator(s) agrees toensure that all appropriate individuals working or consulting on this project shall be aware of this patentdisclosure and assignment requirement.Signed by Principal Investigator(s):(1) — (2) (3) 128EXHIBIT BU of C Disclosure #.THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGOCHICAGO, ILLINOIS 60637INVENTION DISCLOSUREINSTRUCTIONS: See reverse side. Print or type all information. Fill in all blocks.INVENTOR(S) Department and Office Name Faculty Exchange Address Telephone Home Address Citizenship0)(2)(3)TITLE OF INVENTION(Short and Descriptive) DESCRIPTION OF INVENTION: (If more space required, use plain paper. Sign, date and have eachsheet witnessed.)Prior knowledge and information (including publications):Potential Licensees:SUPPORT FOR INVENTION:Sponsor % or $ Award Number*(List all sponsors by name or agency)1 . The University of Chicago2.3.4.5.*For each award on which the P.I. is other than one of the inventors, please provide the name of the P.I.:INVENTOR SIGNATURE (DATE) INVENTOR SIGNATURE (DATE)(D (2)INVENTOR SIGNATURE (DATE)(3)DISCLOSED TO AND UNDERSTOOD BY:WITNESS: WITNESS: Typed Name Typed NameSignature Date Signature DateDistribution: 3 copies to Department Head/Director. Retain one copy for your file.129GUIDE FOR PREPARATION OF INVENTION DISCLOSURE1. Disclose Only One Invention: Use a separate form for each invention.2. Make Your Disclosure Complete: The disclosure of your invention is adequate for patent purposesonly if it enables a person skilled in the art to understand the invention. If you have constructed theinvention, indicate date and location.3. Items to be Considered in Preparation of a Complete Disclosure:a. All essential elements of the invention, their relationship to one another, and their mode of operation.b. Equivalents that can be substituted for any elements.c. List of features believed to be new.d. Advantages this invention has over the prior art.e. Whether the invention has been built and/or tested.f. If apparatus or systems are involved, attach drawings, if available; otherwise, free-hand sketch.g. Give dates and locations of events and of notes, including first description, disclosures, firstscientific demonstration, publications.h. Possible commercial uses in immediate field and other fields.4. Additional Material:Drawings and additional descriptive materials should be in duplicate — each sheet must be signed anddated by every inventor, and properly witnessed. You should include a copy of any present publication or draft of planned publication relating to your invention.5. Prior Knowledge and Information: Identify pertinent publications, patents or previous devices, andrelated research or engineering activities.6. Witnesses: Only persons other than co-inventors should serve as witnesses and should sign each sheetonly after having read the disclosure to understand the invention.Invention Disclosure noted, believed to be in order, and submitted for processing under Universitypatent policies. ¦SIGNATURE OF DEPARTMENT HEAD: (Date)Name PLEASE SUBMIT ALL COPIES TO: The University of ChicagoOffice of Sponsored ProgramsAdministration Room 607130(continued from page 128)Procedures Relating to the University's Administration of Its Institutional Patent Agreement (IPA)with DHEWFollowing are the procedures to be observed inorder to fulfill requirements of the University'sIPA:1. Each application for support submitted toany component of DHEW shall be accompaniedby a signed statement from the Principal Investigators) in the form enclosed as Exhibit A.This statement will be retained on file with theUniversity and should not be physically attached to the proposal.2. Whenever any invention or discovery resultsfrom research or other activities carried out atthe University, or with the aid of its facilities orfunds administered by it, the investigator shallsubmit a disclosure of the invention or discovery as directed on the disclosure form enclosedas Exhibit B. This disclosure form is to be usedfor all University inventions, including thosecovered by the IPA.On March 7, 1977, the University Trustees approved a revision of Statute 21 entitled "PatentPolicy, etc.," which is quoted below.The revision of the statute concluded a study ofthe University's patent policies that was begun inNovember 1975, when a faculty committee onpatents that had reviewed several exceptions tothe patent policy over several years was reconstituted to review the experience of the recentpast and recommend changes in the policy. Thecommittee, consisting of Chairman Richard A.Posner and members Robert Haselkorn, RichardL. Landau, Norman H. Nachtrieb, and Milton B.Singer, issued its report in the spring of 1976,proposing the change in Statute 21. This recommendation was approved by the Committee of theCouncil on October 26, 1976, and by the Councilitself on January 11, 1977.The new patent statute clarifies that all patentable inventions resulting from research or otherwork at the University, or with the aid of itsfacilities or funds administered by it, are the property of the University. The University determines 3. The University has a standing agreementwith University Patents, Inc., a patent licensingfirm, to screen University inventions and discoveries for their patentability and marketability. This firm has representatives available to allfaculty and staff who can assist in the preparation of disclosures and answer questions aboutthe patenting and licensing process. These UPIrepresentatives will be pleased to come to campus to discuss these matters with faculty andstaff. One of them may occasionally initiate adiscussion with a staff member to discuss his orher research to ascertain the potential for patents.Questions about patent procedures and policy,copies of the forms, Exhibits A and B, and requests for assistance from UPI should be directedto my office. Enclosed as Exhibit C is a copy ofthe current statement of University Patent Policy.Cedric L. Cher nickVice-President for Sponsored Programsto whom the patents shall be assigned, i.e.,whether to the University itself, the sponsor of thework, or an outside patent management firm.Such determinations will necessarily take into account any prior arrangements reached with outside sponsors. The University intends to licenseor assign each patentable invention in such a wayas to assure benefits to the University, the public,and returns to the inventors. Procedures forhandling inventions under the policy are to be developed and administered under the direction ofthe president.Under the new policy, the University encourages the development of inventions made by itsfaculty and staff in order that the new ideas maybe brought to the benefit of the public. The policystatement retains the traditional academic viewthat research done primarily in anticipation ofprofit is incompatible with the aims of the University. It is not the objective of academic research toproduce inventions; but when they do arise, theyshould be reviewed by competent personnel whocan facilitate the transfer of useful inventions toEXHIBIT CREVISIONS IN THE UNIVERSITY'S PATENT POLICYBy D. GALE JOHNSON and WILLIAM B. CANNON131industry under arrangements that are beneficial tothe public and recognize the contribution of theinventor and the institution.Several sterjs have been taken to implementthe new statute:1. After several years of experience in dealingwith University Patents, Inc., a patent management firm that specializes in handling patents developed at universities, the Universityhas entered into an agreement with that organization to screen all inventions arising at theUniversity. UPI has a staff of personnel experienced in patent licensing and they have provided competent and timely review of each disclosure submitted to them. The company hasaccepted several inventions for patenting andlicensing, notably the solar collector patents.The arrangements with UPI provide that theyassume all costs of providing technical reviewof the invention; investigating the prior art (including existing patents); determining patentability; exploring the potential commercial market; engaging patent counsel to file patent applications (and paying all filing and counsel fees);locating manufacturing organizations interestedin the invention; negotiating and administeringlicensing agreements; and collecting royalties.As remuneration for these services, UPI retains40 percent of royalties paid on any Universitypatents they handle. Normally, it is expectedthat if UPI determines that an invention is patentable and potentially marketable, it will askfor and be assigned the invention under theagreement, but there is provision for exceptionalcases to be handled by other means.2. Much University work is sponsored by thegovernment and other organizations under restrictions regarding the patenting of inventions.The terms usually permit the University to obtain waivers from the sponsor allowing inventions to be patented by the University on acase-by-case basis. Based on the new patentpolicy, the University has now applied for anInstitutional Patent Agreement from the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. Ifgranted, the Institutional Patent Agreement willgive the University the authority to patent allinventions arising under HEW withoufthe heedfor individual waivers, with certain restrictionsto assure their development for the public good.**As noted above, our Institutional Patent Agreement withHEW has been approved. Similararrangementswillbe sought where feasible with other agencies.3. A standard form of disclosure for inventionshas been developed and will be made availablethrough departments to all University facultyand staff members who make inventions in thecourse of their research activities. The form willbe used to fulfill invention disclosure requirements of grants and contracts. It will also beused by UPI for their screening.4. Patent coordination will be handled throughthe Office of the Vice-President for Businessand Finance, which will: arrange with the Officeof Sponsored Programs for reporting inventionsto sponsors, submit inventions for screening toUPI, and coordinate the University's administration of patent matters. An inventor will submit a patent disclosure to his or her chairman ordirector for preliminary review and transmittalto the Office of the Vice-President for Businessand Finance. The department's preliminary review will be for the purpose of confirming information known to the department chairmanregarding sponsorship for work and any otherpertinent facts.5. Since sponsors of research and organizationsthat engage academic personnel as consultantsfrequently seek to acquire patent rights, it isimportant to review any new commitments regarding patents against the background of thispolicy and any existing patent agreements toavoid potential conflicts. Of course, the provisions of sponsoring or consulting agreementsshould also be reviewed to assure that they donot inhibit the right and obligation to publish theresults of academic research.6. The general plan for distribution of royaltiesreceived from patents is that 25 percent of thenet royalties received by the University will bepaid to the inventor (or divided among the inventors) and the balance divided between thegeneral University and the inventor's Division.The portion for the Division will be applied toDivisional research activities as determined bythe dean, in consultation with the inventor andappropriate chairman or director.7. The officers, in conjunction with the Counciland Trustees, will review activities under thenew policy and procedures, including the agreement with UPI, from time to time to assure thatthey are serving the best interests of the University.132AppendixStatute 21. Patent Policy, etc.a) The basic policies of The University of Chicagoinclude complete freedom of research and the unrestricted dissemination of information. Research doneprimarily in anticipation of profit is incompatible withthe aims of the University. The University recognizesthat in the course of its research activities, ideas orprocesses may be developed from which patentsshould be obtained for the benefit and protection ofthe public interest. It reserves the right, through contract or otherwise, to make appropriate disposition ofpatents based upon work done within its laboratoriesor with the aid of its facilities.b) Every patentable invention or discovery that results from research or other activities carried out atthe University, or with the aid of its facilities or fundsadministered by it, shall be the property of the University and shall be assigned, as determined by theUniversity, to the University" to an organizationsponsoring the activities, or to an outside organization deemed capable of administering patents. TheUniversity, acting directly or through a patent management firm, shall endeavor to license or assign thepatent in such a manner as to assure the greatestbenefits to the University and the public, and providea return to the inventor. The inventor and his Dean orother administrative head shall be consulted and keptinformed of the arrangements. The conditions for thedisposition of patent rights shall be consistent with (1) the basic policies of the University; (2) the terms ofsponsorship of activities that led to the invention; and(3) the requirements of law and professional ethics.Where the University does not wish to direct assignment of the invention or discovery, and the conditionsof sponsorship so permit, the inventor may be allowed to retain ownership and patent the invention onhis own, but in any event the normal processes ofacademic publication will be utilized for the benefit ofthe scholarly and general public. Procedures to implement the foregoing shall be developed and administered under the direction of the President.c) The University will not permit its name or names ofmembers of its staff to be used in advertising.Revised March 7, 1977D. Gale Johnson is Provost of the University andthe Eliakim Hastings Moore Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Economicsand in the College; William B. Cannon is Vice-President for Business and Finance, Professor inthe School of Social Service Administration, andMember of the Committee on Public PolicyStudies.THE 372ND CONVOCATION ADDRESS:UNIVERSALITY AND THE UNIVERSITYBy Alan GewirthMarch 23, 1979I want to congratulate the students who are receiving their degrees today. I know I speak for thewhole faculty in wishing you success and happiness in your future activities.The degrees you have earned reflect concentrations in a wide variety of disciplines, from anthropology and art history to nuclear physics andzoology. By this variety you have specialized inthe use of many different methods of thought andresearch, from the most abstract and quantitativeto those requiring various degrees of perceptiveimagination and empathy. Despite these differences, the education youhave received here has had common and indeeduniversal features. I refer in part, of course, to thegeneral education in which our College haspioneered and for which it is justly famous. But inaddition, those of you who are receiving graduateand professional degrees have also pursuedstudies that have important elements of universality.There is more than an accidental resemblancebetween the words "university" and "universality." A university in the truest sense is defined bya commitment to a certain kind of universality,and amid the many differences in your various133fields of specialization, it is this universality thatmost fully unites you as graduates of the University of Chicago.The universality to which I refer has many different aspects. But what is central to it is a criticalacceptance of the criteria of rationality, as havinguniversal validity both for the intellectual pursuitsto which the University is dedicated and in whichit has always maintained eminence of leadership,and for the moral and social context in which thatdedication is exercised. These criteria of rationality or reason consist especially in a concern forthe fulfillment of certain tests for truth, such asempirical evidence, logical coherence, explanatory fruitfulness. By virtue of these criteria, thestudy and teaching of all the diverse disciplines atthis University emphasize an openness to experience and a critical asking of basic questions, especially at a frontier level where general advances inknowledge can be made.As is to be expected from the context of probinginquiry characteristic of the University, thesecriteria of rationality or reason have themselvesbeen challenged and even attacked. The attackshave ranged from the claims of some anthropologists that each culture has its own peculiar modes of rationality, so that the universal validity I have claimed for the criteria is an illusion,to the assertions of certain romantics and existentialists that the way to truth is to be found notthrough reason or rationality but rather throughfaith, instinct, tradition, authority, emotion, orwill.It is especially pertinent now, however, to consider a different kind of attack on reason. It isepitomized in the doctrine of David Hume andBertrand Russell that reason is powerless when itcomes to determining what is morally good orright, because reason can calculate only aboutmeans but not about ends; it can tell us how to getwhat we want, but it cannot tell us what we oughtto want; it can teach us about empirical facts andcausal and logical connections but not aboutmoral norms or values. If this criticism is sound, itmeans that, the University's commitment to thecriteria of rationality is severely limited in itsscope and does not have the universal validity Ihave claimed for it. The criteriaNWould appljratmost only to the sphere of the intellect and efficiency, but not to that of individual and socialmorality. As a consequence, the moral realmwould be left as something non-rational and evenirrational. This, however, would be a seriouslimitation both on the rational concerns of theUniversity and on the foundations of morality.134 There are at least two kinds of reply to thisanti-rationalist position. One is that the criteria ofintellectual rationality themselves contain important moral elements, so that the attempted divorcebetween reason and morality cannot be maintained. This is shown by the fact that the pursuitof intellectual knowledge, not only in thehumanities but also in the natural and social sciences, requires certain traits of personal and social morality, such as honesty, truthfulness, freedom of inquiry, public communication of results,and willingness to subordinate one's own selfishdesires to impartial acceptance of the facts. Without these moral traits, the very operation of intellectual inquiry becomes impossible.More generally, there is an ethics of intellectualdiscussion: such discussion requires, in additionto the moral traits just mentioned, a certain commitment to justice in the sense of mutuality orequality of consideration. By "discussion" ismeant not a didactic, let alone a propagandists ormanipulative relation, but rather a cooperativeprocess where truth is genuinely sought by allparticipants. Such discussion, including that conducted by logicians and scientists, requires thatone accord one's interlocutors the same attentiveconsideration one wants them to accord oneself,that one respect their right and freedom to contribute as one wants them to respect one's own.This first reply to the anti-rationalist positionincurs, however, a serious difficulty. Individualsand societies may uphold and pursue the rationalvalues of the intellect in an eminent degree, andthereby maintain the internal morality I have justmentioned, while they may be quite immoral intheir other, non-intellectual activities. There havebeen morally corrupt scientists and scholars; andas for societies, we may mention Bismarck'sGermany, which, amid its glorious developmentof research universities, was authoritarian, repressive, and undemocratic.The answer to this difficulty may be that theindividuals and societies in question were wrongin not extending to all other areas of their lives themorality they upheld in their specifically intellectual pursuits. But the crucial question remains:Can this moral wrongness be established by reason itself , using the purely rational criteria I mentioned before?This brings me to the second reply to the anti-rationalist position. The criteria of reason involvenot only the inductive calculation of causes andeffects or means to ends; they involve, even moreimportantly, the maintenance of logical consistency. A person who contradicts himself does notfulfill even the minimal requirements of rationality, for what he says cannot possibly be true, sincehe denies what he affirms; he therefore refuteshimself.But precisely such logical inconsistency is incurred by persons or societies that are unjust orotherwise morally wrong. For they apply to theirrecipients different rules or standards of treatmentfrom those they apply or want to have applied tothemselves. But, at the basic level where humanneeds of action are at stake, all persons are relevantly similar to one another. Hence, such unjustpersons or groups are in the position of holdingthat what is right for one person or group is notright for relevantly similar persons or groups. Andsuch a position is self-contradictory.The argument I have just sketched indicatesthat, contrary to Hume and Russell, the mostrigorous criteria of reason can serve to determinewhat is morally right and wrong as well as what isintellectually true or false. It remains the case,then, that the rational criteria to which the University is dedicated are indeed universal in validity in that they apply to the realm of morality andpractice as well as to that of the intellect andtheory.This universality has many further implicationsboth for individual and social morality in generaland for the role of the University in our society.First, the basis on which the University rightlyseeks freedom for its own functioning as well as alarge measure of private and public support is notthat it is merely one interest group among others,trying to protect and expand its own "turf."Rather, as the institutional embodiment of theuniversally valid criteria of reason, the Universityhas a special claim as representing the most basicmoral as well as intellectual values which followfrom those criteria, and which are at the basis ofour constitutional democracy.Second, as complementary to this point, the rationality to which the University is dedicated entails a recognition on its part that it has moral aswell as intellectual responsibilities. It fulfills theseresponsibilities in many familiar ways, includingits^ policies of non-discrimination and its manifoldfundamental services to the society at large.The University must not dissipate its rationalmission by engaging in political advocacy whereits own values are not centrally involved. But atthe same time* since these values have rationaluniversality, the University's commitment to reason requires a recognition of its indebtedness tothe general framework of moral rationality and acorresponding need for vigilance and advocacy when that framework itself is threatened, wherethe broadest, most general principles of morality,such as basic civil or economic rights, are atstake. It must also be recognized that fulfillmentof this need, like other forms of moral action,must take account both of the moral principlesthemselves and of the consequences, for thosevery principles, of alternative means of effectuating them. In this way, the University can claim therights and carry out the duties that follow from theuniversally valid criteria of reason to which it isdedicated.Alan Gewirth is the Edward Carson Waller Distinguished Service Professor in the Department ofPhilosophy.SUMMARY OF THE372ND CONVOCATIONThe 372nd convocation was held on Friday,March 23, 1979 in Rockefeller Memorial Chapel.Hanna H. Gray, President of the Universitypresided.A total of 290 degrees were awarded: 41Bachelor of Arts, 2 Bachelor of Science, 1 Masterof Science in the Division of the Biological Sciences and the Pritzker School of Medicine, 18Master of Arts in the Division of the Humanities,14 Master of Science in the Division of the Physical Sciences, 44 Master of Arts in the Division ofthe Social Sciences, 7 Master of Arts in the Divinity School, 6 Master of Arts in the Graduate Library School, 1 Master of Arts in the Committeeon Public Policy Studies, 1 Master of Arts inTeaching in the Division of the Social Sciences, 1Master of Science in Teaching in the Division ofthe Social Sciences, 107 Master of Business Administration in the Graduate School of Business, 1Doctor of Ministry in the Divinity School, 1 Doctor of Law in the Law School, 5 Doctor ofPhilosophy in the Division of the Biological Sciences and the Pritzker School of Medicine, 4Doctor of Philosophy in the Division of theHumanities, 18 Doctor of Philosophy in the Division of the Physical Sciences, 33 Doctor ofPhilosophy in the Division of the Social Sciences,3 Doctor of Philosophy in the Divinity School, 1Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate LibrarySchool, and 1 Doctor of Philosophy in the Schoolof Social Service Administration.Alan Gewirth, the Edward Carson Waller Distinguished Service Professor in the Department ofPhilosophy delivered the convocation address entitled "Universality and the University."135REPORT OF THE STUDENT OMBUDSMANFOR THE WINTER QUARTER, 1979By Gail J. HankinsApril 10, 1979As ombudsman I am often asked what kinds ofproblems my office handles, what I can do forstudents, and how I view my role as ombudsman.These questions suggest that while Universitystudents know of the existence of the ombudsman's office, most have only a vague idea ofwhen the ombudsman can be instrumental insolving a problem or when they should go to theombudsman (i.e., what level of frustration theyshould reach before seeking help). Studentsshould feel free to come to the ombudsmanwhenever they are getting nowhere with a problem or if they feel they are expending too muchtime and energy on it. They should also come ifthey believe a University policy is unfair and wantto discuss it with someone who might be able todo something about it. Over the past eleven yearsabout three-fourths of the cases brought to theombudsman have been resolved to the student'ssatisfaction.Of course, some students prefer to work outtheir own problems. I have no objection to this. Infact, students should try to solve their problemsbefore soliciting the ombudsman's aid. However,if the problem has dragged on for several weeks orif it involves challenging a University policy, Irecommend at least dropping by my office to discuss it.How do I view the role of the ombudsman? Isee it as one of problem-solver, trouble-shooter,and mediator. Depending on the situation, I caneither try to straighten out the problem for thestudent, suggest changes in University policy,point out areas of dissatisfaction which demandstudy, investigate a "problem area," or act as amediator between a student and member(s) of thefaculty or staff. In other words, the nature of theproblem determines my role. During the past twoquarters the problems have ranged from those thatcan be resolved in an afternoon to those whichtake weeks of investigation and negotiation, fromthe trivial to those with grave implications.For these reasons and because this is the firsttime the ombudsman's quarterly report has appeared in the Maroon, I have decided to devotethe remainder of my report to a survey of theproblems handled by the ombudsman and the as-136 sistant ombudsman during the last quarter. In thefirst two sections I present some of the simplerproblems while in the last four I discuss some ofthe more serious problems we encountered.Before I go into this, I should explain why Irequested the Maroon to publish this report.Traditionally, reports by the student ombudsmanhave appeared only in the University of ChicagoRecord. Because the Record is published at irregular intervals, there is sometimes a considerable delay between the time the ombudsman submits the report and the time it is available to theUniversity community. With each passing weekthe report loses topicality and consequently someof its impact. In addition, it is my impression thatthe Record is not as widely read by students, oreven faculty, as the Maroon. Thus, by publishingthe report in the Maroon as well as in the Record,the ombudsman can report more directly andefficiently to the University community. I wouldlike to see this become standard practice.During the winter quarter the Office of the Student Ombudsman handled a total of fifty-fivecases involving sixty-seven students. The casestouched upon many aspects of campus life, ranging from academic problems to problems involving housing, the bus service, and extra-curricularactivities. In addition, we received numerous requests for information or direction that did notrequire any investigation.Some of the grievances were the result of administrative error; others of the student's inabilityto prod some sector of the University into actionon his or her behalf . Sometimes students asked usto find out the rationale behind a University policy, and in a few cases students sought aid inchallenging a policy that they considered unjust.Administrative ProblemsMany examples of this type can be cited. Onestudent had not been able to ascertain why hislibrary privileges had been blocked. A marriedcouple had tried in vain for weeks to get the Married Student Housing Office to do something tostop the flow of water into their kitchen. Anotherstudent repeatedly received threatening lettersfrom the government demanding repayment of herloan even though she had filed a deferment formon time. Yet another student had not received herloan payment for several months, first because herfile had been lost and subsequently because theamount allotted had been changed. Another student had been erroneously billed by the hospitaltwo years ago. In each case we were able to solvethe problem to the student's satisfaction.Informational QueriesSome students came to us to find out the whys andwherefores of University policies that they feltwere unfair. The following are examples of themore interesting inquiries we received. "Whydoes Career Counseling and Placement charge afee of $5.00 for each set of credentials sent outafter the first three?" Because this fee covers thehigh and increasing operating expenses of theoffice. "Why can't University of Chicago studentsuse the reading room at the Chicago TheologicalSeminary without paying?" Because the University and CTS no longer have arrangements for reciprocal library access and have no expectation ofre-establishing them. CTS students cannot useRegenstein without paying either. "Why are somany of the machines that vend tampons andsanitary napkins always out of order (particularlyin Cobb Hall)?" Because they are often vandalized and are expensive to repair. "I need todevelop some photographs. Is there a darkroom Ican use?" The darkroom in Ida Noyes Hall can bereserved by individuals for a three-hour period bycalling Ida Noyes.Bus ServiceAfter the exceptionally severe winter it should beno surprise that the most popular target of criticism this quarter was the bus service. Bothminibus and daytime service was disrupted. Theunavoidable problems resulting from impassableand often icy streets were exacerbated by thelong-term construction on Hyde Park Boulevardand, to a lesser extent, by the change in the company running the minibus service. Often, a student who came to report a particular problemwould also share his general impressions of thebus services, noting areas where there was needfor improvement (even under good conditions)and suggesting what could be done to make thingsbetter.As the complaints came in, we passed them onto Al Herbster, Superintendent of Grounds andTransportation. Usually, Mr. Herbster and hisstaff were fully aware of the problem and werealready seeking a solution. While Mr. Herbsterappreciated the feedback from the student bodyabout the weather-related problems, he was moreinterested in complaints about incompetent busdrivers and about chronic delays resulting fromthe unwieldiness of the long bus routes. In thecase of the bus drivers, student grievances received by this office aided Mr. Herbster in convincing the company to fire several drivers or toreplace them on U. of C. routes. Student griev ances also brought to light an apparently unnecessary duplication in the "B" and "C" minibusroutes which was eliminated by shortening the"B" route. Finally, with the encouragement ofthe ombudsman's office, Mr. Herbster was able topersuade the city to open Hyde Park Boulevard atDorchester, a move which significantly improvedthe bus service.Student HealthComplaints about the Student Health Servicegenerally do not pertain to the attitude of the attending physician or to questions of professionalcompetence. Most are concerned with insurancecoverage, billing, or related administrative matters. But there are occasions when the complaintfocuses on the physician. During the past twoquarters we received three complaints about onephysician, and these I referred to the Director ofthe Student Health Service. On his advice, I discussed them personally with the physician whom Ifound receptive to what I had to say.Visits to the doctor are by their nature highlypersonal and sometimes involve delicate problems. It goes without saying that the physician'sdemeanor should be reassuring and that the patient should obtain the best care and the most reliable advice as quickly as possible. Because adoctor's response to a personal problem can colorthe student's perception of the University's attitude toward students in general, a sense of delicacy and propriety is in order. If students findtheir experience at the Student Health Clinic unsatisfactory, they should not hesitate to inform theDirector of Student Health either in person, byletter, or through the ombudsman so that the situation can be ameliorated. At the Student HealthClinic as well as in all other sectors of the University, it is important that students be made to feelthat their best interests are cared for.Academic MattersI would like to discuss two complaints involvingacademic matters. The first concerns the assignment of students to the various sections of apopular common core course. Initial assignmentsare made during pre-registration on a first-come,first- served basis. Because some instructors aremore popular than others, their sections fill upquickly. Later, at the beginning of each quarter, afew students petition to change sections. Reassignment is made according to an established departmental policy. It is important for students tounderstand the criteria upon which reassignmentis made and to feel that they are being treated137fairly. For these reasons the College should bewilling to furnish a written statement of thesecriteria should it be requested by the student.The second complaint concerns an instructor'sobligation to inform his class of his grading standards. Regardless of the methods he uses, the instructor should explain both his grading procedureand his standards of evaluation at the beginning ofthe course and adhere to them throughout. Students must be able to understand the significanceof any evaluation of their homework, tests, orpapers in the context of their total grade.Recreational FacilitiesThe Department of Physical Education and Athletics closed the track at the Henry Crown FieldHouse to individual runners from 4:00 to 5:30weekdays during most of the winter quarter inorder that the University of Chicago intercollegiate track teams could practice. This inconvenienced many students, members of the faculty,and staff who favor late afternoon for their workouts. They were obliged to rearrange theirschedules — often not an easy task — if they wishedto continue to use the facility.Alternatives to the track in the field house, ofcourse, do exist. There is a shorter track inBartlett Gymnasium. It is also possible to runaround the first floor of the field house on the concrete or around the gymnasium in Ida Noyes Hallwhen it is not in use. And one can always runoutdoors. However, to most runners only theout-of-doors represents an acceptable alternative to the excellent track in the field house. And theweather this winter eliminated this possibility forall but the heartiest souls.There was much grumbling about the department's decision. One student came to me to discuss the issue. As a result of this conversation, Icommunicated the widespread discontent to thedirector of recreational facilities, the dean of students, and the president. On his own initiative thestudent collected more than 700 signatures inthirty hours on a petition requesting the facultyBoard of Athletics and Recreational Sports to reopen the field house track to individuals during thehours in question. The board turned down thepetition.This problem will recur each year unless theUniversity can provide its independent runnerswith an alternate, comparable facility. The athletic department is aware of this need and hopesthat funds will be available for a second indoorrunning surface. According to the plans, this two-or three-lane track would be installed in the corridor of the first floor of the field house.In the last few years the interest in sports hassteadily increased on this campus. The Universityneeds alternative recreational facilities to accommodate individual athletes when its main facilitiesare being used for organized intercollegiate or intramural sports. The current fund-raising effort bythe University deserves the support of the entireUniversity community.Gail J. Hankins is the University Ombudsman forthe 1978-79 term.138THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO RECORDVICE PRESIDENT FOR PUBLIC AFFAIRSRoom 200, Administration Buildingo z"0 1 — omj c ?3J O •ois -o^ Iip >S OSTAGIDILUNSIO.31 a§I-* n m^. — o0) 3