Most Harvard students consider a trek to class in the Science Center from the river Houses a daily chore.

But for Jonathan I. Goldberg '00, that's a piece of cake. Every Tuesday and Thursday, Goldberg heads over to MIT--"the trade school down the river" to take a class in accounting.

He's not alone. Last year, 48 Harvard students did the same thing.

Almost a quarter of the 200-some students enrolled in MIT's introductory accounting class last year were cross-registered from Harvard. According to the registrar's office at MIT, after ROTC, accounting draws the most Harvard students to their campus.

Barred from accounting courses at the Harvard Business School (HBS) and wary of the courses offered at the Kennedy School of Government (KSG), undergraduates feeling the lack of an accounting course in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences head downstream to MIT.

No Place to Call Home

Part of the problem is that accounting doesn't properly fall under the domain of any existing academic department at Harvard.

The subject is most closely affiliated with economics, but according to members of Harvard's Department of Economics, the connection is more tenuous than it might initially appear.

"[Accounting] isn't something professional economists involve themselves in," says Ropes Professor of Political Economy Richard E. Caves. "Business schools teach accounting."

According to Assistant Professor of Economics Christopher L. Foote, director of undergraduate studies in the