A Step Backward?

The Faculty meets today to consider once more the curiously complicated question of Cum Laude in General Studies. When it last discussed what part individual departments ought to play in the decision to grant or withhold the special degree from seniors, it agreed that a certain collection of course grades would alone determine a student's eligibility. Once he had abandoned his commitment to the particular work of his department by choosing to forego the thesis and tutorial for credit, the department simply had nothing more to say.

Yet for reasons that it has kept rather vague, the Committee on Educational Policy has voted to recommend extending departmental jurisdiction over C.L.G.S. through a scheme that would permit a senior's field to recommend that he be denied his General Studies Honors degree. This is disheartening news, especially since at the same time the Committee rejected another motion that stuck to the old system of automatic eligibility, but added that in extraordinary cases the departments might have the authority to allow a senior who had failed to declare himself in the fall to transfer into the General Studies program.

The whole debate has all the appearances of triviality, but the remarkable interest some Faculty members have already shown in today's meeting suggests that at stake there are principles that matter. The phrase Cum Laude, fortunately or not, continues to be the symbol of respectable intellectual achievement at Harvard; the encouraging thing has been that the Faculty was willing to embody in C.L.G.S. a concept of intellectuality beyond that of competence in a special discipline. Last year's vote strengthened that concept by removing the departmental voice altogether.

It is really distressing that the C.E.P., a body under no strong obligations to departmental ideas and in a position to lead the liberalization of requirements in the Faculty, has lost heart and wants to backtrack. The original notion behind C.L.G.S. needs champions who can reverse the C.E.P. vote in today's meeting, and adopt the excellent proposal the committee unaccountably rejected. If the departments are to have further influence on "General Studies," whose very name means learning outside concentration, it should be on expanding rather than restricting the degree.