Winthrop Forum Debates Doty Report

The author of the Doty Committee Report on General Education last night heard his chef d'oeuvre strongly criticized by four fellow Faculty members and a number of undergraduates at a Winthrop House forum debate on Gen Ed.

Richard T. Gill '48, professor of Economics, and secretary of the Committee, compared the discussion to a meeting of the committee: "In an average meeting you heard arguments for everything from having each student, in co-operation with an adviser, work his own gen ed program, to having perhaps 12 or 13 of one's 16 courses required."

Gill heard all the suggestions again last night.

The chief spokesmen in opposition to the report, however, were the four Faculty members and one student who, with Gill, made up the panel:

* Giles Constable, associate professor of History, called the report "a surrender to professionalism." Challenging the idea that "we should teach physics for physicists, history for historians," Constable suggested substituting a distribution requirement for the Doty Report's suggested six-course general education program.

* Barney Frank '62, teaching fellow in Government, argued for "complete laissez-faire for undergraduates" in selecting their courses. "No one has yet shown me a rationale for taking courses in fields I don't care about," Frank said. "If people prefer to specialize, they

* John Steiner '65, chairman of the ought to be free to be superficial. I just don't think general education is a good thing."

HCUA committee on Educational Policy, ought to specialize, and people also said that "General education doesn't have to be simply a balance for departmentalization. It is a good thing in itself, not as something distributional, but as a way of finding out how things work."

* Donald Brown, assistant professor of Government, criticized the report's "failure to distinguish between a departmental course and a gen ed course. There is something wrong with the departmental structure; as knowledge increases, departments are developing their own languages."

Brown called for "the development of a generalized outlook in the social sciences that says that one cannot understand political theory without understanding, say, psychology." He defended the idea that Harvard can expect each undergraduate to study one natural science and "to be familiar with certain basic texts in literature and philosophy."

The speeches opened the floodgates for a barrage of questions, lectures, and philosophical ramblings from the 25 undergraduates who showed up. Gill was called on to defend specific aspects of the report.