Aiken Scores Drift in Gen Ed Policy

to satisfy Gen Ed requirements.

Trend to Specialize

Aiken says that the traditional division of courses at Harvard was saved only through "very eloquent opposition, in part by certain humanistically oriented scientists." But the general trend in University education today, at Harvard and elsewhere, is, he says, "in the direction of the forms of specialized research and instruction which are useful to the national society and which therefore receive the largesse of its government."

University leaders, themselves educated to become "highly trained scientific technicians," have tended to think of their schools as industrial plants that should run smoothly and efficiently.

"It is no accident I think that, as Time magazine cheerfully reported out in a recent issue, leaders of business and heads of universities have become interchangeable parts," says Aiken.

Professors, too, have been educated to feel at home only in their specialty, he says, and university departments develop "educational and professional commitments that frequently (although by no means always) lead away from the concerns of liberal education." Fragmented Gen Ed

Even those professors or university heads who want earnestly to "save something from the wreck of general and liberal education in our universities" are "functionaries of the very system which general education is meant to counteract," he says.

"All our manifestoes, Red Books [Harvard's original Gen Ed plan, adopted after World War II], and reports on the need for the reform of general education bear witness everywhere to this fact.

"We too -- we scholars -- have conceived the educational problem ... as the problem of integrating professional minds of the sort we know all too well."

That, he says, is the mind of "the academician of whom knowing about things, rather than knowing them ever more appreciatively and discriminatingly, is the main achievement to be hoped for from the higher forms of learning."