Dean of the College Lee Pelton said he hopes to have a final set of recommendations adapted from the proposals made by the Committee on the First-Year Experience by the end of this month.
Pelton, who chaired the committee last year, will discuss the final recommendations with students and faculty members and will present them to the Board of Trustees at its Spring term meeting.
"To be honest, the next steps are tentative but they include, tentatively, the issuance of a final set of recommendations to the Board of Trustees," he said.
Pelton said his final set of recommendations will "respond to the recommendations in the report and what I have learned in my conversations with students, faculty, alumni, administrators and parents."
"I need more time to digest and understand those parts of the report that have been praised and those parts that have been criticized," Pelton said.
Between now and the Trustees' spring meeting, Pelton said he will continue to gather campus opinion on the recommendations.
"I want to be sure those recommendations are issued in a way that students will have the opportunity to comment on them directly to me and to the Board of Trustees," he said.
Pelton said this opinion gathering will primarily take place in meetings with students in "focused group settings or informal gatherings at my house with invited faculty."
The committee's original recommendations, intended to increase intellectualism outside the classroom, included the creation of three primarily-freshman residence clusters that would have a senior faculty member living nearby.
In the next month, Pelton said he will mull over proposals and ideas submitted by students.
"I've heard a lot of very good suggestions, and I want to better understand those," he said.
Pelton said student concerns he will consider include issues of faculty advising for freshmen and basing housing assignments on academic courses.
Also, Pelton said he is trying to determine an appropriate ratio of upperclassmen to freshmen in primarily-freshmen residence halls.
Committee member John Strayer '96 said he believes since the Committee on the First-Year Experience released its report last May, Pelton has been reasonably open to student opinion.
"For Dean Pelton, some parts of the report are very sacred and he's not open to suggestions that would result" in their demise, Strayer said.
Strayer cited the report's proposal to have faculty members playing an integral part of students' residential communities as one of those "sacred parts."
John Honovich '97 said he also believes there are some recommendations on which Pelton is not willing to compromise.
Honovich is the spokesman for Students for a United Dartmouth, a group of mostly conservative students that strongly opposes freshman-residence halls.
"I don't think Dean Pelton is willing to compromise on major residential life points, those are the core elements he's not willing to relinquish," Honovich said.
"He seems very reasonable about other things," Honovich said. "Incremental change is welcome but I don't think he's going to bargain on the core elements."
In an earlier interview with The Dartmouth, Board of Trustees Chair John Rosenwald said not all of the committee's recommendations will be decided by the Trustees.
"Historically the Board has not involved itself at a micro-management level, so clearly the Trustees would be involved in those parts of the proposals which involve College funds" such as the construction of new beds and programming fund increases, Pelton said.
