General Dissatisfaction

Harvard can be a lofty place, so it’s not surprising that its framework for undergraduate education was designed with lofty goals: The College’s program in General Education seeks “to prepare [students] for an ars vivendi in mundo,” or the art of living as "mature adults in the world at large." General Education's performance since 2009 has shown that the program’s means cannot achieve so ambitious an end.

A much-needed mandatory five-year review of Gen Ed released this spring revealed what most on campus already knew: Students and even faculty have trouble articulating the philosophy behind Gen Ed. But it’s more than ostentatious Latin phrases and language and overwrought principles that have made Gen Ed a failure.

For one thing, many of the Gen Ed classes specifically designed to fit into the program’s model are, in a word, bad. Professors are incentivized to create classes where students will learn something impossible to teach. No one course can turn a student into a citizen of the world, and instead widening the scope and aim of a class tends to make that class too scattered, too easy, or both. Many Gen Ed courses, engineered to be more useful than your average college course, become useless instead.

Other, better classes—ones that would have had a place in the course catalog even without the Gen Ed program—often don’t qualify for Gen Ed credit. Some government concentrators on the American government track enter senior year with unfulfilled United States in the World requirements despite having learned more than most students about, well, the U.S. in the world. Similarly, social studies concentrators who spent hours pondering ethical reasoning will often find they have yet to fulfill Ethical Reasoning.

This flaw stems partly from the Gen Ed application process, which asks professors to explain how their courses comply with program’s philosophical underpinnings. Many choose not to bother, especially when Gen Ed courses draw in hordes of students interested in a class not because of its curriculum but rather because of its Gen Ed designation.

Simple distribution requirements would achieve Gen Ed’s basic goals without forcing students to take classes tailored to goals they do not understand. The College could divide all existing classes into categories, whether they are broad—the humanities and STEM, for example—or narrower, and ask that students take a certain number of classes in those areas.

That way, students will learn more at Harvard than what they want to focus on coming in or what they end up focusing on coming out. Some will discover they are passionate about something they never would have guessed would draw them in. Others will simply leave these ivied walls knowing a little more about the world than they would have otherwise. That’s already “ars vivendi in mundo”—the Latin and the cumbersome logistics gone, but the learning intact.