A Long Step Backwards

The Doty Committee, charged with refurbishing and reformulating the program of General Education at Harvard, instead endangered that program with an overly politic and vague report. By failing to make a strong enough case for special Gen Ed courses and a strong administrative structure to staff such courses, the Committee made it possible to interpret Gen Ed as a distribution requirement.

At the last Faculty meeting, such a plan was proposed and warmly applauded. Giles Constable, associate professor of History, recommended that General Education be a system of requirements which a student could satisfy either with introductory departmental courses or with Gen Ed courses.

Although the Constable proposal has not yet been drawn up into a specific report or amendment, its implications are disturbingly clear. If it were adopted, Harvard would be taking a long step backwards to the days before the publication of the monumental "Redbook," General Education for a Free Society, when the College's counterweight to departmental education was a similar system of distribution requirements.

It was, in fact, just such a system which led to the formulation of the present program of General Education. The Conant Committee was concerned with the practical problems of a distribution requirement--how one should decide what courses would fall in what areas--, and the requirement's philosophical inadequacy--it wasn't adequately countering the growing phenomenon of specialization.

The regression is, of course, not the only issue; what is equally important is that adoption of the Constable proposal would reflect a willingness on the part of many Faculty members to dodge the knotty problems of General Education. The prospect of satisfying a commitment to General Education within the departmental structure is naturally appealing to a Faculty which, for the most part, has only reluctantly left the haven of the departments to teach Gen Ed.

But however appealing the proposal may be to the Faculty, it violates a central and, we believe, invaluable tenet of General Education--namely, that a Gen Ed course can usually do a better job of countering specialization than an introductory departmental course. A Gen Ed course gives students a unique and necessary experience by its special ability to combine either disciplines, historical periods, or national styles. It is the value of this experience which underpins the philosophy of General Education.

No one has yet confronted the really crucial question, the goals and purposes of Gen Ed, and everyone has tried to solve Gen Ed's administrative problems by working only from the correct but simplistic assumption that students need to take some courses outside their field of concentration. Only for these reasons has the distribution plan, which ignores any but the most obvious goal of Gen Ed, been taken so seriously.

Besides the philosophical bankruptcy of the distribution plan, its adoption would mean an abnegation of Faculty control over the content and quality of Gen Ed; would make the continuation of traditional Gen Ed courses dependent on the dubious test of popularity; would, in short, signal a cowardly retreat from educational responsibility.

The Constable proposal has now forced the Faculty to a difficult decision: Are there valuable qualities in a Gen Ed course which (1) must be preserved and (2) must be required? The decision to build a program of Gen Ed on the definition of a Gen Ed course is difficult because it involves a positive argument which must delineate the benefits which are derived from a Gen Ed course as opposed to a departmental course, because these benefits are not the same in the Sciences, Social Sciences and Humanities, and because it has always been easier for astute minds, working outside their areas of expertise, to criticize rather than construct.

But the decision to defend, preserve, and require the Gen Ed course should be made, either at today's Faculty meeting or soon after. Throughout the country colleges are re-evaluating their programs of General Education and looking to Harvard for leadership. If a distribution plan is passed by the Faculty, those colleges will be able to find only one explanation: Gen Ed has been emasculated by the forces of expediency.

There are a number of Faculty members who dislike the distribution plan for positive, principled reasons. Although it will take both courage and eloquence to redirect the debate to the crucial question of the value of the Gen Ed course, these men must speak out now.