A Birthday Cake for the Doty Report

John Finley likes to describe history as "a mysterious river--there are many ways of seeing that river and you cannot altogether understand its flow. Whenever a man looks at it from a different angle, he gets a different view."

Whatever its merits as a definition of history, Finley's river is a very good description of the Faculty's debate on General Education since the Doty Report was first published a year ago. Most people seem to feel that almost nothing has happened, that the Gen Ed program will remain the way it is. But Finley, chairman of the Faculty Committee on General Education and a guiding spirit of the program since its adoption in 1945, found the results of the debate "a great triumph for General Education" and foresaw "a splendid new era" for the program. Dean Ford has also called it "most valuable: this kind of debate is needed periodically to remind us of our duties," he commented, adding, "there is a generation of Faculty members who came to Harvard since the last General Education debate and were not aware of the Faculty's commitment to the program. Now I think this commitment has been made clear."

Nor is anyone certain of the effect of the 102-page booklet published a year ago this week. At first the Doty Report seemed certain to be adopted. It had been the unanimous publication of a nine-man committee of varied backgrounds, varied outlooks, and varied associations with Gen Ed. It had been approved by a 9-1 vote of the Faculty Committee on Educational Policy, the group that must vote on all such proposals before they are debated on the Faculty floor.

But as the year passed, it became apparent that there was opposition to the report. The Faculty debate opened in October with criticism of the program coming from the heads of three lower-level Gen Ed courses, among others. In four months of voting, several of the report's proposals went under. In January, the Faculty voted 94-87 against requiring students to take General Education courses; in March it threw out report's system of course requirements, and did not approve a system of incentives for teaching Gen Ed courses, as the report had suggested.

Looking back, it now seems clear that the report was in trouble from the beginning. It was unanimous only because a "conservative" faction that had been committed to a program essentially like the existing one gave up and signed a report that was to some extent a compromise.

There has always been another element of the Faculty that has simply not been reconciled to a Gen Ed program (though this group turned out to be smaller than expected. Ford says he thought "that you'd find a large group that would say that General Education was too much of a strain on the departments to be worth-while," but few speakers in the debates took that view). A "libertarian" faction composed yet another minority that wanted relative freedom for students to pick what courses they wanted.

But the bulk of opposition to the Doty Report, at least in the open Faculty debates, centered around the proposal to change the three-way division among Gen Ed courses (Social Sciences, Natural Sciences, and Humanities) for a two-way division. This would be created by combining History with the Humanities and including a new "Behavioral Sciences" category (anthropology, psychology, social relations, and "appropriate portions" of Government) along with the traditional "Natural Sciences" in a new "Sciences" category. Humanists like Reuben Brower and Rogers Albritton objected to the debasement of the word "Humanities;" social scientists like Samuel Beer objected to the separation of history from the economists, psychologists, and sociologists who had done much of its advanced work.

After a 94-38 vote defeated his committee's proposed course requirements, Paul Doty, threw the floor open to other proposals. The Faculty flirted briefly with an alternate proposal sponsored chiefly by Giles Constable, then came back to where it had begun, voting approval of a program very similar to the present one. The three-way division of courses would be retained, the course requirements would be similar. The only changes were a reconstitution of the General Education Committee under the Dean of the Faculty as chairman, and an agreement in principle that the Gen Ed Committee should draw up a list of "designated" departmental courses a student could take to fulfill his Gen Ed requirement.

So the Doty Report apparently failed. But mysteriously, this does not seem to have been entirely the case. In discussing "Problems of the Present Harvard Program," the Doty Report cited three areas within the Gen Ed program that it hoped to improve. The first was "the present administrative structure (which) seems inadequate to the task of providing a major, required program of Harvard College." The second was the limited number and depth of course offerings which "have been too inflexible to take account of various levels of student preparation." The third was that "the content of the present program is so organized that it either underemphasizes or omits some of the most vigorous areas of modern thought."

The first problem has been dealt with in the debate. The Committee on General Education will now be chaired by Dean Ford. "That should work very well," Finley says. "He can be a combination of Jim Farley and Secretary Udall--Farley because he has the power and prestige, and Secretary Udall because he has the knowledge of our natural resources."

The committee chose to deal with the third problem--that of the under-representation of certain areas of study--as an organizational question. Making the behavioral sciences a separate category was an attempt to induce behaviorists to offer courses, and the Faculty turned this down.

But while the debate was in progress, something has been happening. Without any reorganization of the program, areas that have never been represented in Gen Ed have been brought into the program. The report specifically mentioned the creative arts. Next year will see Harvard's first Gen Ed course involving acting for credit and Ford looks forward to bringing the Visual Arts Center into the program soon. A hundred freshmen will be given Gen Ed credit for a course in Far Eastern history next year, as the Gen Ed curriculum strays further and further from its original home base of "western culture."

The only criticism which received no answer at all during the year was the second one--the lack of depth in Gen Ed courses. In defeating the Doty plan, the Faculty apparently turned down the otion, included in the committee's plan, of allowing students to take a sequence of two increasingly difficult courses within the Gen Ed program.

But the Gen Ed debate is by no means over. Now the CEP must construct a new Gen Ed program based on the series of Faculty votes.

Whatever the new fommulation, the new Gen Ed Committee will be taking over the program at a crucial moment. The professors who have given life to the Gen Ed program since its inception cannot carry the burden much longer. Finley, L. K. Nash, Samuel Beer, and Gerald Holton have taught the same lower-level Gen Ed courses almost every year since the program was made mandatory in 1949. Reuben Brower's Humanities 6 is 11 years old.

From somewhere, the Gen Ed Committee must dredge up a large number of new lower-level courses in the next few years. And unless the Dean proves a most skillful talent-seeker, it seems all but certain that he will have to turn for these new courses to new new fields--in particular, to the behavioral sciences and to the non-verbal arts within the Humanities. The men within the classical fields, willing and able to teach Gen Ed courses, do not seem to be there. Unless the new debates have provided an impetus that will provoke new courses from the old sources--English, history, government, philosophy, and so on--the Gen Ed program will have to either broaden or be seriously weakened.

Depth, too, may come with time. In the Natural Sciences particularly, the upper-level offerings at present are extraordinarily weak. Perhaps the Gen Ed committee will decide ultimately that the way to attract unusually qualified professors to the Gen Ed program is to offer them unusually qualified students--to institute upper-level Gen Ed courses with stiff prerequisites.

The Doty Report, two years in the planning, a year in the debating, may seem at the moment to have been a complete waste of time. But in a few years, the Report may take on a very different aspect. It has pointed the Gen Ed program down a road towards which most of the Faculty apparently would be very reluctant to see it travel, but down which time and circumstances may send it nonetheless