Voting would take place this spring and into the fall if more time is necessary.

Kirby said he would like the curricular review to have at least some agenda time at every full Faculty meeting from now until its completion.

Pinker said he is optimistic that the general education group can meet the deadline of the end of the semester.

“I wouldn’t say it is impossible, since there are three months to go,” he wrote in an e-mail. “The pace would have to pick up, and the level of discussion would have to get concrete fairly soon, for us to reach a consensus (or at least a majority) by then.”

Ford Professor of the Social Sciences David Pilbeam, who chairs the Committee on Advising and Counseling, said that group plans to complete their task by January or February.

But, Pilbeam added, coming up with recommendations for advising is less difficult than creating new general education requirements.

“[With] advising and counseling, we can figure out what we need to do,” he said. “It’s not that it’s easy but it’s not a philosophically difficult set of tasks.”

“It’s always going to be general education that’s the big thing,” Pilbeam added.

The General Education Committee of this year inherited its predecessor’s responsibility to develop and plan for a proposed system of Harvard College Courses.

Last year’s report recommends that Harvard shift from the Core Curriculum to a distribution system, in which students will have to take two classes in each of five areas. Provisionally, these areas will be the humanities, the social sciences, the natural sciences, the physical sciences and engineering and international perspectives.

Supplementing the distributional requirement, however, would be the Harvard College Courses, a set of foundational courses in several broad areas of knowledge.

The General Education Committee will be responsible for hammering out and finalizing the areas included, along with such specifics as which current Core classes might survive into the new incarnation of Harvard general education.

As for the Science and Technology Education Committee, member and Professor of Anthropology Daniel E. Lieberman ’86 said they are making “incredible progress” and are geared toward finishing on target.

—Staff writer Laura L. Krug can be reached at krug@fas.harvard.edu.