In an interview with the Crimson last week, Elizabeth Nathans, the new dean of first-year students, said that working on the advising system is one of the tasks topping her agenda.

That is welcome news. Harvard should be embarrassed by the quality of its undergraduate education, and advising is one of the system's weakest links.

Nathans appears to be highly qualified to improve the advising program for first-year students. She is the creator of a much-praised pre-major advising program at Duke University which assigned every first-year to a faculty member advisor.

Nathans said she doesn't think a similar program would work at Harvard. Although she said she hopes to involve faculty more in the advising process, she said she believes this will be a difficult goal to achieve with Harvard's busy faculty and the present advising setup, which often revolves around entryway proctors.

It is a shame that Nathans will not implement the advising program here--and even more of a shame if it is true that Harvard's faculty would not be willing to give their time to such a program.

The great weaknesses of Harvard's undergraduate education are that classes are large and impersonal and that contact with faculty is all often minimal. First-year seminars are only a token effort to change this, and many students who apply for these seminars are rejected.

Graduate students conduct most of the advising that students get during their time at Harvard. Sometimes this system works fine. Graduate students know the ropes and their proximity in age to undergraduates facilitates easy communication.

But faculty members have academic wisdom that graduate students lack. they can help motivate and push students to succeed with tools that the average graduates students need in an advisor is experience, and that is what the faculty is member can offer.

Nathans says that getting faculty more involved will be difficult because the Harvard faculty is overcommitted.

As a former faculty reporter for The Crimson, I know this is true. Faculty members must juggle teaching duties, research projects, departmental administrative duties and their personal lives. And I know many professors also have important commitments outside the University, such as attending and speaking at conferences.

This is a question of priority. It is my belief that Harvard faculty members' first and foremost commitment must be to the education of their students.

Assigning every first-year to a faculty member would help achieve this. Faculty advisors could stay with their students through all four years and serve as guides on both general and specific academic questions.

A system organized along the same lines as Nathans' Duke program would not be impossible to implement here--even if one were to expand it to more than just first-years and included all undergraduates.

There are currently 393 tenured faculty and 227 junior professors, making for a total of 720 faculty members, With about 1600 first-year, there are about 2.2 students for every faculty member. Over four years that means about nine students. If each faculty semester for an hour, the total time expenditure for professors would be 27 hours per semester.

Twenty-seven hours is a significant amount of time. Faculty members would have to change some commitments and priorities. But the extra work is certainly worth the payoff. A system such as this would dramatically boost the quantity and quality of the University's advising for all student.