Gen Ed Plan Needs Strong Support: Doty

The chairman of the Doty Committee said yesterday that the success or failure of the proposed new Gen Ed plan would depend on how it was administered by the Faculty and the revised Committee on General Education.

Paul M. Doty, professor of Chemistry, said that "the operation is going to rise or fall on generating new upper-level Gen Ed courses pretty quickly. It would be unfortunate if the Faculty were not asked to reaffirm its commitment to the program."

At a meeting last March, the Faculty voted to recommend (but not require) that all departments devote 10 per cent of their teaching time to Gen Ed.

Doty, whose report delved into all the aspects of the Gen Ed program and made numerous proposals for reforms, suggested that the CEP had adopted a different tack. He said the committee "has chosen to provide the minimum structure on which a Gen Ed program can be built, and left it to the General Education Committee to put some flesh on the bones."

The Doty Committee studied the Gen Ed program for two years before issuing a 100-page report in May, 1964. After a five-month debate, the Faculty voted down several of the report's principal proposals and asked the Committee on Educational Policy to draw up a new program, based on the "straw votes" taken at meetings during the year.

The new plan would permit a student to fulfill his lower level Gen Ed requirement in any area either by taking a lower-level Gen Ed course, as at present, or by first taking one of a number of "designated" departmental courses and then an upper-level Gen Ed course.

Thus upper-level courses would be brought into the program's requirement for the first time. But Doty said his committee had found the content of these courses to be very loosely defined at present.

"What consistency the courses have is almost entirely due to the chairman of the present Gen Ed committee [John H. Finley Jr. '25]," Doty said. "The departments, I think, might have trouble outlining new upper-level courses that wouldn't also serve as departmental courses. But the departments are going to have to generate them, and a Faculty mandate for the program might be very important in bringing this about."

Asked if the CEP plan would solve some of the problems his group found with the Gen Ed program, Doty said that "If you had to touch on just two or three points, I'm fairly satisfied that they've made a good choice. It just makes it more necessary that the committee be given a strong mandate."

He praised the idea, included in the CEP plan, of demanding that students take five courses that do not count towards concentration. "He said the implementations of their rule "would have a very profound effect. It would get at the English major who takes English history courses for his distribution requirement -- and there are departments that allow almost any courses in the catologue to count for concentration."

He called the CEP's plan for including departmental courses in the program "a rather clever devise," and said he was glad that the plan provided some competition for lower-level Gen Ed courses