JOHN W. BOYER
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issue of professional and collegial support within the institutional and cultural milieu of the arts and sciences at Chicago has not been a problem for the Dicksons. The College Curriculum Committee undertook a study of the concentrations during the last two academic years. Its report, completed late last year, will be distributed shortly to the full College Council and the directors of departmental and non-departmental concentrations. From one perspective, the concentrations are the orphans of the administrative structures, dating back to the early 1930s, under which Chicago is organized. True, in constitutional terms, the concentrations would seem to belong to the College, because they are part of the baccalaureate degree programs of all College students and because those degree programs fall, in turn, under the jurisdiction of the College. But most concentrations have their actual, political, and intellectual homes in one of the departments, and the departments, as statutory agencies of the University, are parts of the Graduate Divisions, not the College. These administrative arrangements mean that the College has few formal ways of motivating, rewarding, or supporting in concrete financial and other professional terms either departments as collectivities or individual departmental members who provide exemplary leadership in running a concentration program. This is not to deny that many of our concentrations are extraordinarily well run, but such success is often achieved against the predominant cultural grain in which graduate and especially Ph.D.-level education is still seen to be the primary coin of the realm in many of our departments in the arts and sciences. At the same time, it is also important to acknowledge the structural problems created for our concentrations by our general-education Core. The Core dominates the academic experience of many College students for nearly two years. In fact, that is precisely the historic role of the Core,
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