CLGS Revisited

With its action this fall on the Honors degree in General Studies, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences touched off a superlative example of that sort of debate which the University Administration usually refers to as "enlightening discussion," and which the CRIMSON commonly calls "heated controversy." Interest in the issue ran high, and naturally so. In the privilege of dropping the thesis without forfeiting eligibility for an Honors degree, many students saw a quick road to academic glory; much of the Faculty saw a stack of uncompleted manuscripts.

Response to the ruling was not very favorable. Immediately after the policy was approved, dissatisfaction was so deep and so widespread that many Faculty members felt sure their next meeting would bring about the new rule's demise. The prediction, of course, was wrong; but the basis on which it was offered could not have been more correct. The weaknesses in the present Cum Laude in General Studies policy are obvious to most of the Faculty. If this majority did not choose to manifest its opposition in January, its inaction should be attributed to gracious compliance with a hastily called truce, rather than to doubts about political strength.

Hopefully, the truce will diminish neither the conviction nor the number of the dissatisfied Faculty members. At his most recent interview, Dean Ford told the CRIMSON that the CLGS would appear on the Faculty docket in May. At that time, the new policy must be changed.

The objectionable provision is the one that allows students to receive an Honors degree in General Studies without having declared their candidacy for it at the beginning of the senior year. The stipulation that they do so must be restored, and for two reasons.

The first of these concerns the present policy's effect on the Honors program and thesis work. As the CRIMSON argued earlier this fall, "any piece of writing, especially writing based on much research, is bound to impose strains that make the writer want, whimsically or fiercely, to abandon it at some point." The traditional CLGS rule encouraged the student to stick with his thesis--his most important academic undertaking--rather than rewarding him for running out on it.

Secondly, the new rule undermines the hope that General Studies Honors can be a course program, rather than merely a kind of degree. When the Faculty instituted the old policy, in February of 1961, it also converted a long-standing distinction between Honors and non-Honors into a distinction between programs with, and without, tutorial instruction. The important point was that either the tutorial or the non-tutorial program could lead to an Honors degree--the tutorial, by way of departmental Honors rewarding a competent senior thesis; and the non-tutorial, by way of the Cum Laude in General Studies.

By making every student a candidate for General Studies Honors, regardless of whether he begins a thesis, and regardless of whether he ever finishes it, the Faculty has done away with the concept of a choice between separate programs. More importantly it has also destroyed the concept of a choice between alternatives of equal respectability. Many of the General Studies degrees conferred this June will no doubt go to Honors candidates who wrote poor theses. This circumstance, repeated over several succeeding years, will inextricably link the idea of the CLGS with that of second-rate performance.

The debasement of General Studies Honors would be regrettable, especially at a time when the pressures for specialization are greater than ever before. There are no steps more dangerous for Harvard than those that discourage the student, in any way whatever, from exploring disciplines outside his field of concentration. The CLGS, under the old policy, had become the symbol at Harvard for just this sort of exploration.