Word: hpc
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...chief engineer of this modest student power coup is Norr, who has worked on pass-fail through every phase of its tangled history. He was a member of the 1966-67 HPC which hit upon the idea one spring afternoon of combining its desire for a free fifth course and pass-fail into one package proposal...
...fifth course pass-fail plan never appealed to Norr or Riesman, then one of the three Faculty HPC members. They argued that it was little more than a dressed up form of auditing and would put psychological pressure on students to increase their course load to five. Norr toyed with the idea of filing a minority report to the CEP. But the HPC traditionally hammers out its differences in closed meetings and then presents a united front when it arrives at a recommendation. So Norr decided to give no hint of the HPC's internal dissension...
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
...move looked 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...