If just one more student drops Geography 49, "The Nation and its Others: France, the Jews and the Muslims," the class will be cancelled.
While new and obscure courses already draw few students, Geography 49 has also suffered from being omitted from the College's course catalog and, until the end of the summer, from its Internet course listing. All things considered, the course's second day total of five students is no surprise.
Geography professor Emanuel Rota implored enrolled students to stick with Geography 49 for the sake of the course and each other.
"If someone wants to drop the class, then I'm not going to stop them, but I would prefer to have a sort of consensus decision where everyone decides together," Rota said.
Rota's problems are typical of the underenrollment faced by many classes in the Jewish studies program.
Meanwhile, departments like government and economics are struggling to accommodate the massive numbers of students subscribing to their courses. With extensive waitlists, professors in these departments are left to choose between dozens of pleas on one the hand and the desire to retain small classes on the other.
Professor Wolfgang Gick, who teaches the popular Economics 21 course, has begun to automatically raise his course limits by five students to accommodate surplus.
"That is the small space I have to maneuver in, and I generally use it," Gick said.
Oversubscription is, however, not a new problem for the College.
English professor Peter Saccio, who will retire sometime in the next two years, has taught a class on Shakespeare for 40 years and said he has always dealt with massive numbers of students. The size of his classes has fluctuated from 60 students to over 250, when a computer glitch left the cap off the course, he said.
This year Saccio has raised the cap from 60 to 67 to allow junior and senior English and theater majors to enroll.
Saccio expressed some reservation about the large size of his class.
"Shakespeare is always popular, and he should be," Saccio said. "The problem is grading all those papers."
Still, Saccio said he did not feel overwhelmed by lecturing to so many people.
"There are many things that can be taught well by lecture, and its an efficient way to teach," Saccio said. "I think I'm good at getting a lot of people together and making it interesting -- I'm something of a performer."
Caught in the middle of closed and folding courses, some students have had trouble getting into the classes they need or want.
Nick Newman, a transfer student from Tulane University, said he was aggravated by what he called Dartmouth's "complicated" course selection system.
"Tulane is set up a lot easier to understand. You just get on the Internet some time in the first couple weeks and click -- a five-year-old could do it. Dartmouth has a lot of lines and waivers," Newman said.
Despite course complications around the College, it was business as usual at the Registrar's Office.
"The start of the year is always really busy at our office, but overall it's been a wonderful start of the year," College Registrar Polly Griffin said.
