Freshman Seminars

This afternoon the Faculty will determine the future of the freshman seminar program. Like other Harvard educational experiments, the program has grown to the point where no one thinks of stopping it, although that choice is formally open to the Faculty. The significant decision which the faculty must make is, how is the program to be continued?

The Conway subcommittee of the Committee on Educational Policy, appointed to evaluate the freshman seminar program, has prepared seven recommendations. Of the seven, the sixth suggests the crucial choice before the Faculty: whether or not the seminars should be made consonant with the program in General Education.

As described and evaluated in the 100 page appendix to the recommendations of the Conway subcommittee, the freshman seminar program and the program of General Education presently work at cross-purposes. Some quotations from the report, written by Byron Stookey and endorsed by the subcommittee, will suggest that one of the aims of the seminar program is to induce students to follow their teachers into an academic career. The seminars "have utilized inquiry in depth (a) as a means of demonstrating the nature and methods of a significant academic area; (b) to provide opportunity for the student to discover what scholarly inquiry in general is about... (d) to give early opportunity for the student to test strenuously his academic pre-dispositions." (p. 8) "The seminars were in no sense to replace departmental courses; they were, ideally, to heighten their impact." (p. 17) "We did not worry that by pursuing a focused inquiry we would lose sight of breadth or method--we hoped, rather, that in the pursuit the student would discover breadth and method..." (p. 39) The report continually emphasizes the value of close association with an academic specialist as a means of learning at first-hand "the nature of scholarly inquiry: its rigor, its integrity, and its rewards."

The real direction of the seminars becomes clear in a remark following a discussion of how the seminars effect changes of field: "The data seem also to suggest, incidentally, that the seminars, perhaps by example, have affected students' views of teaching and scholarship as a career: Among the seminar group, between the beginning of the freshman year and October of sophomore year, there was a 55% loss of prospective teachers and scholars; the control group (of students who had not taken seminars) lost 12.4%." The seminars act as a recruiting agency for the Academy.

"General education," says the Red Book, "must consciously aim at these abilities: at effective thinking, communication, the making of relevant judgments, and the discrimination of values." These aims perhaps include the aims of an academic career; certainly they go beyond them. Therefore a program of general education which relies on the freshman seminars as some are presently conceived will fail of attaining its aims.

Most graduates of seminars have felt their seminars effective in accomplishing the aims of general education as defined by the Red Book, only when the seminar explicitly undertook broad questions or had what the report calls "centrifugalness"--the seminar "begins in a small radius and as it accelerates encompasses an ever-expanding field. But there have been seminars, and seminars, and seminars, that have lacked both breadth and "centrifugalness." As the proportion of seminar leaders drawn from the junior faculty increases, there is little reason to suppose that the proportion of narrow seminars will decrease. To save the freshman's program from schizophrenia--Gen. Ed. courses on one side, seminar on the other--the seminars need the guidance of the Committee on General Education.

The sixth recommendation of the Conway subcommittee is "that the committee reviewing the program of General Education [the Doty Committee] be requested to consider the relation of the seminars to that program." The obvious step for the Doty Committee is simply to extend Gen. Ed. credit to seminars in addition to the few in the social sciences which already have it. It should be clear now that such a step would prove fatal to any program which conceives General Education as something more than academic dilettantism.

Thus the Faculty should make more specific the seventh recommendation of the Conway subcommittee, "that a standing committee of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences be appointed to supervise the freshman seminar program." That committee must be the Committee on General Education.

The remaining recommendation of the subcommittee are as innocuous as they are trivial. They, and Stookey's entire report, duck the real question before the Faculty this afternoon: the relation between General Education and the freshman seminars.