22 Professors Suggest New Gen Ed Program

Twenty-two Faculty members yesterday proposed an alternative to the Doty Report. They called their plan "a somewhat simplified and liberalized version" of the Gen Ed program Harvard works under now.

There is one major difference--students would not be required to take specifically designated General Education courses.

Instead, each student would be required to take four courses outside his area of concentration. Retaining the present three-fold division of Gen Ed courses (but with the suggestion that they be renamed Humanities, Sciences, and Social Studies), the program would require a student to take at least one course in each area outside his field.

Two of these courses would be selected from a "designated list" consisting of lower-level Gen Ed courses and introductory departmental courses approved for the purpose by the Committee on General Education.

An alternative is included: the "designated courses" could be replaced by nondesignated ones at a 1-to 1.5 ratio--three departmental half courses would substitute for a full course from the designated list.

A student could take either Gen Ed or departmental courses to fulfill the rest of his requirement.

Giles Constable '50, associate professor of History, said the new plan represented "an attempt to shift attention to teaching and away from curriculum, with which the Doty Report was almost entirely concerned."

It was Constable who called together Faculty members who had voiced the most opposition to sections of the Doty Report in the three Faculty meetings at which the report was debated.

"We don't all agree on all the details of the plan," Constable said. "We recommend a substitution of 1.5 departmental to one Gen Ed course, but I doubt that any of us would vote against the package if this were changed to two or one."

The report would let students petition the Committee on General Education to be allowed to fulfill the Gen Ed requirement by their own program.

It also proposes that subcommittees of the Committee on General Education be established for Humanities, Sciences, and Social Studies. Each of these five-man committees would study the Gen Ed courses in the area and maintain Hatson with the departments.

The subcommittees would be made up of three Faculty members from within the area in question, and one from each of the two others.

Other aspects of the original Doty report are changed in the new plan. The Doty Committee take over the Freshman Seminar program; the new report merely says that Gen Ed's relationship to seminars and Independent Study "needs further study."

The new plan does not include, as the Doty Report did, a requirement that each department devote 10 per cent of its teaching time to General Education courses. It does not mention the Behavior al Sciences, which were to become a separate Gen Ed field under the Doty Report