Factions Clash as the Ed School Grows

In whatever way some future historian of Harvard characterizes this year at the Graduate School of Education, he will certainly have to say that is was a year in which the students were heard.

They churned out newsletters and created committees, circulated questionnaires and issued reports, bending the collective ear of the faculty and administration in every way they knew. As a result, they have won the right to consult and participate in the decision-making processes of the Ed School, have begun a systematic evaluation of Ed School courses and procedures, and have taken on the task of criticizing and analyzing the Scheffler Report--a faculty plan for major reform at the Ed School.

And though the attention they have received this year belies it, making themselves heard is not new to Ed School students, for they have a long history of poking around in their own shop.

The fact that Ed School students are always had so much to say about what is happening to them arises in part from the kinds of people who suppose the HGSE student body. Some are flip about education, and some are very serious, but practically all of them come to the gradual or sudden awareness that the profession they have chosen involves a frighteningly total commitment. Many have traveled the Peace Corps route, or have worked in undergraduate projects in city slums, or in civil rights organizations. Many have already taught, and have faced resistance to new ideas from unimaginative colleagues and administrators in apathetic communities with under-achieving students. The single attribute common to the students in the Ed School, however, is that most of them have seen enough of the real world to know that they want to change it.

Ed School students accept the fact that HGSE is really not interested in being the purveyor of teachers to the nation. They know that the School may supply teachers--by coincidence--but that it clearly concentrates its energies on preparing its students to achieve positions of leadership in teaching, administration, and scholarship.

Some think this vision of purpose is insidious, while others consider it noble, or maybe Machiavellian, or perhaps altruistic, or impossible, or sensible. It may be all these things or none of them, but whatever it is, it seems to have worked well--so well, in fact, that when one thinks of graduate schools of education, Harvard's is usually the first to come to mind.

And so, Ed School students view Harvard as the place where they can get their hands on the levers that will move education. But when the school has not lived up to their expectations, they have seldom hesitated to make themselves heard, when and where it counts.

There is a certain volume and urgency, though, that characterizes the student voice this year, qualities which differentiate it from student voices of the past.

One reason for this is that the Ed School is experiencing a period of rapid growth. Its students now number over 800 and come from nearly 100 colleges in all sections of this country and 14 foreign nations. They come too, with backgrounds in law, business administration, theology, and journalism, as well as all of the liberal arts disciplines. The faculty has grown accordingly. It has over 175 members now, with almost half of the senior faculty having been named within the last two years, and represents an unusual admixture of humanists, sociologists, scientists, historians, psychologists and the like.

Conequently it has become increasingly difficult for the faculty and students to feel that they are part of the entire enterprise of the School. Many have found it difficult to keep informed of what is going on, not only in the whole School, but in their own programs as well. Even the School's informal afternoon teas now draw about 200 students and faculty members each day to the plush Eliot-Lyman Room, and have grown from quiet gatherings with important topics of conversation to something resembling a theatre intermission. A sense of isolation exists, and it has been felt by faculty and students alike, but it has been the students who feel they have suffered most, and who, in a sense, think of themselves as the forgotten people.

Some of the urgency and volume of the student voice is a result of the Scheffler Report, which after exploring and rejecting the notions that the School's functions be farmed out to the other departments in the University, that it train only academicians, that it became a research institute with no students, or that it train only teachers, decided that the special challenge of the Graduate School of Education is to "identify and feed into the center of the University the live problems of school and community, and concurrently, to concentrate all relevant energies of the University upon the educational enterprise."

Specifically, the report proposed the allocation of a greater portion of the resources of the School to doctoral

(Andre Favat is a Teaching Fellow in Gen Ed A. and serves as President of the Student Association of the Graduate School of Education, where he is an Ed.D. candidate in English, and a supervisor in the MAT program.) sudy, the lengthening of the MAT program to "one year plus," and the establishing of a new, required, full year courses for all master's candidates which would replace all or parts of a number of existing introductory courses.

The Report also re-organized the faculty into three disciplinary areas: humanities, social sciences, and psychology, and three clinical areas: administration, guidance, and teaching, thereby reaffirming the School's intent to balance research and practice. Proposed. too, was a school-wide coloquum for doctoral students.

But many of the School's students bristled at the generality of even the most concrete proposals, and faculty reassurances notwithstanding, they feared that the implementation of the proposals would vitiate the new things, and merely slap a new coat of paint on the old. While there was still time, many of them thought, student action might be able to affect faculty deliberations.

The general student restlessness on many other American campuses has also had a part in causing the Ed students to rub their sleepy eyes. They found that they were not alone in feeling that as students it is their right to have some say in their education. But the future educators' attitude toward increased consultation with students by faculty and administration, and toward student involvement in the decision making process is more precise. Training to become the movers and shapers of American education, many of the Ed School students feel that it is eminently reasonable that they should have a hand in shaping their own education.

With all this as the impetus to action, the School's Student Association agitated for, and won, faculty recognition of student "mirror committees" on Academic Policy, Lectures and Publications, and the Library, funded a student-run newsletter which has already criticized passive student roles and the training of the School's teaching fellows, and along the Harvard chapter of Phi Delta Kappa, backed an evaluation of Ed School courses. At the same time, another group of students banded together informally as the Woeful Educators, obtained two course innovations, and will soon submit reports on urban education, supervision of student teachers, and course planning.

Student initiated activity in the School has not been without its problems, however, for the urge for reform has not been felt equally among all the students in the School. The doctoral candidates, though they have been crucial to the continuation of the movement, have not been the instigators of it, and have been accused by the one-year students of being "company finks."

And indeed, the doctoral candidates are very much tied in with the operation of the School. They do not feel isolated from the administration and faculty of the School as do the one-year candidates. Engaging in the research activities of the faculty, doctoral students work closely with them, supervise the MAT's in their student teaching experience, and fill many of the administrative positions in the School as assistant directors of various programs, as well as assistants to the Dean.

As a result, they know where they can find someone who will listen to them, and take very seriously the idea of going up the ladder of authority until they find someone who will act on their suggestions or plans.

Because they are around for a considerable time, doctoral candidates are able to take advantage of the unusual flexibility of the Ed School programs and to shape their studies to their own liking. They experience very little of the pressure of degree requirements, lecture courses, student teachings, and tutorials that face many of the one-year students who will soon confront the alarming realities of the lower schools, and for whom the year at Harvard represents a fantastic cram session that must equip them for their first few years of teaching. And so it is not surprising that it is the one-year people who appraise the situation as being acute, who want things changed now, even though they may not benefit from the change. They do not have the feeling that many doctoral candidates have, that if they are not heard this year, they will be heard some following year.

Nor has the student movement been without its own internal political disagreements. Because some members of the Woeful Educators imagine that the spontaneity and spirit of free criticism will be stifled by official recognition, they have spurned the suggestion that they ally themselves with The Student Association's Committee on Academic Policy. On the other hand, many of the WE group argue that the most effective way of getting action on the forthcoming reports will be to submit them through the Student Association's SCAP as the representative voice of the students.

There is also great concern for what sort of legacy will be left to Ed School students yet to come. Previous years saw the students inspecting the Library and the placement Office, examining the doctoral program, or confronting the faculty with alternatives to the MAT experience. But there were few attempts at perpetuating these efforts, and if they remain at all, they do so only in the fuzzy memories of a few administrators and the oldest doctoral candidates. Determined that the current student activity will have more lasting effect, many of this year's group are struggling to produce viable schemes of continuity for it. They realize they must succeed, for unless they do, that future historian of Harvard will not have much to say except that all the noise along Appian Way this year was little more than the sound of a pop gun