When President Bok took office in 1971 there was much speculation, administrators say now, that he would commission a committee to draw up a comprehensive report on undergraduate education at Harvard. That report was never commissioned-partly because a newly appointed young president who had gone to Stanford couldn't hope for any success if he commissioned a group to override the Harvard Faculty on matters of education.

The timing wasn't right, either. Only two years earlier students had staged a sit-in at University Hall, an event that paralyzed and polarized the Faculty. There hadn't been enough time to heal the wounds, let alone talk about restructuring the College. And there was something else: two other Ivy League colleges, Yale and Princeton, were themselves undergoing self-scrutiny in the form of educational commissions, and it seemed logical to wait and see what they would produce.

Now things have changed. With the sense that the Faculty paralysis has at last subsided, Dean Rosovsky - one of the Faculty's own - has commissioned seven task forces to go forward with a comprehensive report on the next ten years of undergraduate education at Harvard. The task forces are empowered to make a series of recommendations-some broad, some nuts-and-bolts - for changes in the academic structure of the College.

But the wait-and-see process has not brought encouraging news-the reports on undergraduate education at Yale and Princeton left legacies of mostly failure, mixed with a modicum of success. Those results shed a considerable amount of light on what kind of results the task forces might obtain when they pass their general and specific recommendations to the Faculty in 1977.

Don't use the word 'mentor' if you want to reform undergraduate education at Yale

In April 1971, Yale President Kingman Brewster decided that Yale College badly needed "a coherant, purposive articulation of the goals of education at Yale." He asked Robert A. Dahl, a professor of Government, to chair a blue-ribbon committee of five faculty and administrators and produce "broad recommendations concerning the future of Yale College over the next 20 years."

One year later the Dahl report, a 117-page book filled with 60 recommendations about undergraduate education, was in the midst of being tabled by the Yale faculty. What happened between the christening and the collapse serves as a warning for others on the inherent dangers of giving committees broad mandates for educational reform. The failure of the Dahl report also points out the inherent logistics and timing problems in enterprises of this nature.

"What we had hoped the report would do at least was provide wide discussion," a disappointed Dahl says today about the report's performance. "It didn't even do that." What went wrong? Dahl's version portrays a faculty basically unreceptive to change and a student body that cared little either as the primary reasons for the dust that has since gathered on the report.

Some of the report's suggestions are just now being adopted, mostly in diluted forms and through other committees. But its major recommendations, particularly the bold "mentor plan," an elaborate residential college-run program that marched students with faculty tutors, have been forgotten. The impetus for the mentor program, Dahl says, was the need to change ineffective advising and counseling that students received. But Dahl says the plan, which would have provided 15 mentors per college ruffled the feathers of the faculty, who viewed it as "a threat to departmental programs" and as "raising the danger of declining standards of education at Yale."

Nancy Hoskins, secretary to the committee, remembers well the discussion on the mentor plan, which left her deeply disappointed about the possibilities for change. "It was the word 'mentor,'" she says. "'Mentor' just didn't go over well with the faculty. We even tried to discuss other words to call the program in committee because we thought something like this may happen. But we came up with nothing else new, and it hurt." Hoskins adds that the plan was a way to get more faculty-student interaction, but it was seen as a criticism of the current system of advising.

The faculty greeted the report - particularly its mentor recommendations - with "massive indifference," Hoskins remembers. If anything, only a small appendix note on a possible change in the lengths of the school term to save money caused any stir. But that stir was strong enough to distract the faculty from the other 117 pages of the Dahl Report. The appendix suggested that the school should remain open all year to try to increase tuition revenue without crowding classes. "The debate on the report waged on that appendix," William Kessen, Yale professor of psychology and committee member, recalls. Ironically, after all "that vigorous and negative response, we ended up adopting that calender in modified form," Kessen says.

The two biggest drawbacks to educational reform, the committee members assert, were the faculty's reluctance to change and its growing awareness that the school would not have the funds to carry out the major recommendations of the report. Worse, with the debate over the report's appendix came the understanding that not only could things not change for the better but that the status quo would have to be cut back and the number of faculty reduced. "The fact that Dahl didn't have the price tag for his recommendation injured us," Hoskins says. "They told us originally that we shouldn't be bounded by finances, but it was finances that inevitably took all the attention away from the report's major recommendations.

"If I had it to do over again," Dahl says now, "I would include some students." He says without student views the report lacked important. Also, Dahl says he was disturbed by the dearth of alumni comment, which could only be remedied by an improvement in Yale's communications with its alumni.

Kessen says that the report got too bogged down on the specifies of change. He said the attention spent on the summer plan was a setback-a sidelight ended up dominating the report's wealth of academic recommendations.

To Hoskins, the drawbacks of the report were its timing and lack of promotion. The university had just discovered that because of economic conditions, it couldn't do whatever it wanted any more, she says. One of the discussions the report sparked was over the university's skyrocketing fuel oil bills, she adds.