Word: pass-fail
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When Norr became HPC president in February he faced a dilemma. The fifth-course pass-fail plan was only a hair further away from adoption than the fourth-course one is now--it had been approved by the CEP and was scheduled for the next Faculty meeting. But Norr still didn't like it and now he had a chance to kill it. The new HPC members agreed with his position and they voted to repudiate their predecessors' proposal
...like a debacle. The CEP withdrew its recommendation from the Faculty docket and the HPC's prestige plummeted. Old members argued that the new HPC had thrown away, for the sake of principle, the best change students could practically hope for. The new members didn't get their own pass-fail recommendation ready until mid-April, too late to try to bring them to a vote at the Faculty's May meeting...
Norr had little reason to be cheerful about the HPC's prospects as the new year began. He was worried by the departure of Dean of the College John U. Monro '34, who had nursed the fifth course pass-fail to CEP approval and shuttled information back and forth between the Administration and the HPC. Without Monro, it seemed the HPC might go the way of the Harvard Council on Undergraduate Affairs, the abortive student government the HPC and HUC succeeded...
Dean Glimp has attended HPC meetings far less faithfully than his predecessor. For six long weeks this fall there was no action on pass-fail, and it seemed to Norr that the lines of communication with University Hall had broken down...
...thrown on its own devices, the HPC was able to convince the Faculty that the fourth-course pass-fail idea is workable. The HPC turned to what Norr calls "a lot of politics" -- a letter to Dean Ford, conferences with CEP secretary Edward T. Wilcox, and visits to individual CEP members...