During the past year, one standing committee was dissolved--the Committee on Regional Studies. The most recently created standing committee is the Committee on Folklore and Mythology, established by the Faculty in the Spring of 1967 to award undergraduate degrees in the field.

Crossing Lines

The number of standing committees generally has increased in recent years, according to Dean Ford, mainly because more groups of Faculty members have been coming forward with ideas for new instructional programs that cross the lines of existing Harvard departments. Folklore and Mythology is the latest example.

It is the special committees, however, that have dominated Harvard news for the past two years in particular. They too are more numerous than ever before, according to Ford.

Special committees get started in three different ways, according to Ford:

* A group of Faculty members in a sense constitute themselves into one and asked Ford and the Faculty to legitimize the group. This is the case of a small special committee on Ukrainian Studies. Such a committee may eventually become a standing committee and begin a degree program in an area like that.

* Some area of the Faculty's jurisdiction is due for a review and a special committee is created to undertake the job for the entire Faculty. The Faculty has, for example, just created a special committee to review Harvard's Development Advisory Service, a wing of the University that sends teams of economists to underdeveloped countries requesting a little intellectual foreign aid. This review may take several years; when it is finished, and its report in, the committee will be dissolved.

* A problem or new set of proposals arises and a special committee is created to investigate and recommend appropriate action by the entire Faculty. This would include the Committee on Recruitment and Retention of Faculty, the Committee on Afro-American Studies, and the Committee on the future of Harvard's overcrowded undernourished Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. These committees usually have an unspecified but accepted time limit of perhaps one term or one year in which to report back to Ford and the Faculty.

Most of these special committees are needed. Ford maintains, because the problems they tackle simply do not fall within the sphere of any of the 37 standing committees.

"It can get to be a headache," Ford says. "There are times I'm almost nostalgic for a simpler time when it was clear who had the power (to take up new issues and problems)."

The reason for the rising number of special committees lately is a "matter of history" to Ford. Traditional committees, he says, have not been able to cope with the increasing number of problems and proposals in recent years that cross or are outside existing administrative spheres of authority.

Special committees serve other purposes too. They are the best way to get problems and issues "out in the open," according to Ford, away from the bowels of University Hall. He says the increased willingness (and demand, it might be added) of students to be heard on such issues has had something to do with it. A special committee is free to take testimony from both students and other interested faculty members while studying its particular problem. Many of the special committees of the past year used that freedom.

Some cynics around Harvard have claimed that Ford has used special committees as a means of legitimizing actions he and his personal staff had already agreed upon. Faculty committees have been "mandated", they say, to come in with the already agreed upon recommendations.

Ford denies this--mostly. He can and does quickly cite Paul Doty's special committee on the future of General Education at Harvard, whose report three years ago surprised many people, and led to extended Faculty debate and alterations--unlike the usual Faculty rubber stamp of committee recommendations.

The Committee on Recruitment and Retention of Faculty also "thought up a lot of things I hadn't thought of," Ford says. He thinks its recommendations may not have smooth, quick sailing through the Faculty either. Some senior faculty members, he says, do not like the committee's "implied emphasis on fighting to get junior faculty."