General Education: The Program To Preserve Harvard College

What the Supreme Court does periodically for American law and the Party Congresses do for the development of Soviet Marxism, and what the Ecumenical Council is in the midst of doing for the Catholic Church was last effected at Harvard College in 1945 when the Faculty Committee on "The Objectives of General Education in a Free Society" published its final report.

Like the other august bodies, the Committee was summoned to adapt doctrine and practice to new conditions, or as President Conant put it in his charge to the group in 1943, to assure "the continuance of the liberal and humane tradition." And though the Committee's findings were in no sense regarded as supreme pronouncements, they did much to set the terms of curriculum debate among college and secondary school educators. In the style of its Soviet counterpart the Faculty Committee suggested a new "line" for thought on education; in a more down-to-earth American tradition it was careful to tie all ideological utterances to concrete problems and practicable recommendations; and in the best ecumenical spirit it included among its members eminent scholars representing a cross-section of academic disciplines.

The result of the Committee's deliberations, the well-known "Red-book" on General Education in a Free Society, is one of the few publications in the history of the Harvard Press to have sold more than 50,000 copies. Outside of Cambridge it is still read. At Harvard it has unobtrusively become the basis for discussion of college curriculum on both the theoretical and working levels. By the weight of its influence the colorless phrase General Education has been established as the slogan under which some of the most pressing issues of college policy are examined.

A Barometer to the College

Harvard people, in fact, have come to think of a liberal education as consisting of two parts: "departmental" and "general." Departmental instruction, provided by the various fields of concentration, is that which teaches discipline, thoroughness, and command of a given method and limited body of information. General education, by contrast, is addressed not to the specialist but to the intelligent outsider. "Its approach," as the undergraduate Committee on Educational Policy recently put it, "deviates from the scholarly in that its aim is not principally scholastic or even analytic but speculative.

"Above all, Gen Ed is meant to serve as a powerful loosening force on a student's intellectual timidity--a timidity too often reinforced by the acquired pedantries of concentration. ...It can allow his mind to range over an enormous variety of possible human actions and alternatives in a way that no departmental course can do without losing its rigor."

General Education has thus become a catch phrase for that part of the Harvard curriculum which is "collegiate," which does not even attempt to imitate the comprehensive standards of specialized study. On the working level it concerns itself with the question of what courses in the Humanities, Natural Sciences and Social sciences Harvard undergraduates should be required to take in addition to their course for concentration. On the theoretical level it is concerned with the ancient and lofty question of the aims and meaning of a college education.

Since Gen Ed combines all kinds of considerations--philosophical administrative, pedagogic, and even budgetary--it is a sensitive barometer to the atmosphere of Harvard College. A by change in the college will be signalled by a change in Gen Ed.

Administrative Disarray

It was therefore a noteworthy event when in the fall of 1962 Franklin Ford, the new Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, appointed the eminent chemist Paul M. Doty to chair a committee to reexamine the Gen Ed program. Ford's action was a sign that the evolution of the college over the past 20 years has thrown General Education into disarray and again brought into question the purposes of undergraduate education at Harvard.

Administratively, the Gen Ed program has gone out of joint as a result of non-departmental programs which have impinged upon its authority and functions. The sophomore standing program now permits ten percent of each entering class to skip the freshman year and, incidentally, to dispense with a large portion of the Gen Ed requirement. The Advanced Standing program, which this year involved 40 per cent of the freshman class, weakens Gen Ed still more by giving students college credit for subjects outside their field of concentration. The Freshman Seminar program, in which more than one-fourth of this year's freshmen were enrolled, further invades the province of General Education, often by exempting students from Gen Ed A, the English composition course. Then there are the Independent Study and House Seminar Programs, two non-departmental activities which were partially inspired by Gen Ed and fulfill part of its function. Finally there is the problem of staffing Gen Ed courses that has become particularly acute in the Natural Sciences.

The Nat Sci Problem

The difficulty in getting scientists to teach elementary Gen Ed courses is an intensified version of the recruitment problem in other fields. Teaching a Gen Ed course involves a total commitment to non-specialized undergraduate education, a commitment which all departments have good reasons not to embrace. The natural intellectual momentum of an academic department carries it to the frontiers of knowledge in its field and tends to make departmental courses "pre-professional" programs to initiate the student into the most recent discoveries. The same momentum drives professors to seek satisfaction outside the Harvard community. Certainly more prestige (and often more money) is attached to advising leaders in government and industry or to chairing a section of the American Association for the Advancement of Science than to teaching a first-rate course to Harvard undergraduates. "In physics," Gerald Holton says, "many of us spend an average of one or two days a month out of the country, not to mention the time spent outside of Cambridge. The center of gravity of faculty loyalty is shifting away from Harvard Square to wherever one's professional concerns may lead."

For the scientist outside professional concern are apt to be more interesting. A humanities lecturer may on occasion present the results of fresh researches to freshmen; but in the Natural Sciences only graduate school courses are "creative" for the teacher. Untrained undergraduates and scientists simply do not speak the same language.

But it is also true that scientists at Harvard have in the past been willing to teach their language only to future specialists. Few professors and fewer untenured personnel can be coaxed into taking a year or two off from the race for government grants to bridge the gap between the Two Cultures. This year, for instance, there were only two advanced Gen Ed courses given in the area of the Natural Sciences, as compared with eleven in the Social Sciences and nine in the Humanities. The statistic suggests that scientists feel they have nothing tell the intelligent outsider.

Other statistics suggest that the feeling is mutual. Studies made for the Doty Committee indicate that where-as science students take a healthy number of courses outside their area, many undergraduates in the Humanities and Social Sciences take only the barest minimum of science courses-- i.e. one.--during their four years at Harvard. The major reason for this is not lack of interest in science but the lack of suitable course offerings in the Harvard catalogue, and, one suspects, the shortage of scientists communicative enough to meet the challenge of addressing the non-specialists.

Loss of Zeal

The appointment of a respected chemist to chair the present committee is recognition that it is among-scientists that the Gen Ed program most needs a new mandate. But the spiritual energy of the original program has run down elsewhere too. Conceived at the peak of the war effort, the Redbook was drafted with a sense of democratic mission that has since become dated.

One could catch an allusion to the college of the German universities in President Conant's charge to the original Redbook Committee in 1943: "Neither the mere acquisition of information nor the development of special skills and talents can give the broad basis of understanding which is essential if our civilization is to be preserved." "Our purpose, is to cultivate in the largest possible number of our future citizens an appreciation of both the responsibilities and benefits which come to them because they are Americans and are free."

Today's academics feel uncomfortable with such rhetoric. Conant himself has gone off to write books urging American high schools to give less education for democracy and more vocational training. The sense of re-building, of urgency, of making a fresh start has been lost since the war, and the ringing phrases which expressed it, however fresh they may still seem to politicians in the nation's capital, are taking a rest among the professors at Harvard. A revised Gen Ed program will have to draw its inspiration from a more timely, more fashionable, more cautious ideal.

A Modest Approach

The Doty Committee has accordingly proceeded less ambitiously than

The Doty Committee

Paul M. Doty, Professor of Chemistry, Chairman

Bernard Bailyn, Professor of History

Paul H. Buck, Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor and Director of the University library

John H. Finley, Jr., Eliot Professor of Greek Literature and Master of Eliot House

Richard T. Gill, Assistant Professor of Economics, Master of Leverett House Leo Goldberg, Higgens Professor of Astronomy

Gerald Holton, Professor of Physics

John U. Monro, Dean of Harvard College

David D. Perkins, Associate Professor of English

chairman of the Redbook committee

member of the Redbook committee its predecessor. Whereas the original committee consulted with over 80 educators from colleges, universities, secondary schools, labor unions and industry; the present committee has largely limited its interviews to the Gen Ed "shop," i.e. to those concerned with administering the program at Harvard. Whereas the Redbook Committee published a 267-page volume addressed to a national audience, the Doty Committee thinks more in terms of a fifty-page pamphlet which, though it may be of interest to other colleges, will be written largely-in Harvardspeak. And, whereas the 1945 committee prescribed changes in curriculum without reference to actual classroom conditions, the new group has commissioned empirical studies of patterns of course selection among Harvard undergraduates.

The Doty Committee, in sum, has abandoned the Messianic preoccupation with "universal" General Education and narrowed its attention to-everyday problems at Harvard. The theme of its final report will surely not be, as a distinguished reviewer once said of the Redbook, that "Harvard Wants to Join America" but rather that "Harvard Wants to Mind Its Own Business." Instead of saving Western Democracy the Doty Committee has a more modest aim: the preservation of Harvard College and the cultivation of a new, more-up-to-date version of the liberally educated man.

Preserving The College

No, the College is not collapsing: the $82 million Program for Harvard College has assured its financial security; the House system since 1930 has guaranteed its residential integrity; the prestige of the institution has lately enabled it to choose its students from among some of the most highly qualified applicants in the country. Still Harvard College is threatened, not with extinction but with loss of identity in the midst of an encroaching University.

The friction between Harvard College and Harvard University was a major concern of the Redbook, a concern, which might have been the dominant one had the war not intervened. In the late Thirties Harvard students and faculty were expressing increasing dissatisfaction with the role of "specialism" in the College. Several Student Council reports which were later endorsed by the Dean of the College deplored the effects of the free elective system which had been introduced by President Eliot in the latter half of the nineteenth century to initiate Harvard into the research activities of the German universities. As the importance of specialism grew, the elective system went in opposition to the British tradition of individualized undergraduate education that had marked Harvard since its founding and seemed to be reducing the College to a preparatory wing of the graduate schools.

During the Thirties strongly worded criticisms of the elective system also came from the University of Chicago, which had pioneered a program of General Education based on "great books" and installed a special faculty to teach the new undergraduate courses. Robert M. Hutchins, Chicago's Chancellor, branded Mr. Mr. Eliot a "great criminal...who applied his genius, skill and longevity to the ask of robbing American youth of their cultural heritage." Similar sentiments could be heard at Harvard when the war broke out and gave an urgent tone to the criticism of Germanic specialism. But though the war influenced the tone of the Redbook, it had nothing to do with the writers' faith in a liberal education, in the value of a purely collegiate educational experience. The great gift of the 1945 committee to Harvard, then, was not its missionary zeal but its establishment of a program for perpetuating instruction in the non-professional side of education.

Position of Strength

The Gen Ed program was not merely a temporary measure to redressing the balance between College and University it gave Harvard an administrative weapon which might be used whenever the College was in danger of losing its support. As John U. Monro, Dean of the College, recently put it, "a soundly conceived program of General Education can become . . . the central position of the central position of strength from which the whole college--president, dean, faculty members--coming together in the name of the college,--can, quite simply do those things for its students which ought to be done, but which we know will not get done if instruction is left entirely to the departments."

Post-war developments have made this "position of strength" particularly valuable. The natural inclination of the departments to ignore the special problems of undergraduate education has been encouraged by the social demand for specialists as reflected in government research grants, foundation support, and even in the aspirations of the undergraduates themselves. More than eighty per cent of Harvard's students now go on to graduate study. As a result the Harvard community has become increasingly fragmented. The deans of the various graduate schools have assumed new importance and power, independent enclaves of specialized study have grown up within the university community (e.g. the three regional research centers, the center for International Affairs, the Cambridge Electron Accelerator, the various economics research projects). In Cambridge as in other university towns, the new rule is each man to his own tent.

Since the College remains as the the only part of the University which cuts across the various academic fiefs, an administrator anxious to draw together the many parts of Harvard may begin by strengthening the College, and within the College by fortifying the Gen Ed program. For along with the House system, Gen Ed is one of Harvard's two purely "collegiate" programs.

The Doty Committee has by now agreed that Gen Ed should be clarified and strengthened. It has, for example, discussed administrative measures for solving the recruitment problem, including putting the Dean of the Faculty or President of the University in charge of Gen Ed and giving the Gen Ed program various kinds of leverage to pry professors and teaching fellows away from their departments.

The committee has also examined the interrelation of Gen Ed with other non-departmental programs to determine whether any one can be combined under a unified administration. It has considered altering the present Gen Ed requirements, such as making Gen Ed optional for some students, and two years of Nat Sci courses required for others.

The introduction of various multiple options to make the Gen Ed requirements more sensitive to differences individual interests and levels of preparation has been discussed.

Sample Proposals

Most interestingly, the Doty group has considered introducing whole new areas of instruction into each of the Gen Ed fields.

In the Humanities where Gen Ed is at present literary and philosophical, the Committee has talked about bringing into the Gen Ed program courses in "non-verbal languages" (art, music and photography) and creative courses in writing, music, art, and theater.

In the Social Sciences, where Gen Ed has been overwhelmingly concerned with Western culture and almost exclusively oriented toward political theory and history, the committee may require all students to take a course in non-Western culture and may put more emphasis on systematic social sciences like economics and psychology.

In the Natural Sciences, where students interest has been lowest, there will undoubtedly be an increase in the number of upper level course offerings. If there isn't the Doty Committee will have been dismal failure.

Such proposals--and none are yet anything more than tentative-reflect the collapse of the philosophy of General Education. The Redbook program had a coherence suggested by its title. By General Education in a Free Society it meant education for citizenship, or leadership, as the case might be. It accordingly stressed those goals which most fit customary ideas about the operation of democracy. Since constitutional democracy is based on acceptance of common principle and traditions, Gen Ed was designed to incucate a sense of Western values and heritage. Since democracy operates through discussion, Gen Ed was asked to develop a sense of criticism and a common language of cultural reference and allusion.

Twenty years later, values are considered unteachable and shared experience impossible in a pluralistic society. Instead, the Doty Committee turns to a vague ideal of flexibility. The Generally Educated man who has taken its new courses is not prepared for participating in a democracy so much as processing his own perceptions. He learns what it is like to put on the biologist's thinking cap or the musician's or the anthropologist's. If he comes out of school dedicated to an ideal it is something he has picked up on his own time. In his courses he deals with analyzing problems.

The drift of the Doty Committee's discussion of introducing new courses in all fields is inspired by an ideal of an up-to-date cultured man capable of appreciating the latest changes in the world, rather than one dedicated to a traditional heritage.

Or perhaps it is premature to credit the present effort to reexamine Gen Ed with any general views of a cultural ideal. The major problem in General Education is administrative, not philosophical: it is to strengthen the bargaining power of the College in its dealings with the departments, or at the very least to enable the College to coax from the departments a new pledge of loyalty. For it is still an open question whether a four-year college "experience" makes any sense.JOHN H. FINLEY, JR., co-author of the Redbook and a member of the Doty Committee, has the longest record of service in General Education. As Chairman of the Faculty Gen Ed Committee, he is responsible for recruiting teachers for new courses. In addition, he teaches in Hum 2 ("Epic and Drama") and Hum 3 ("The Experience of the Drama").