Curriculum Reform at Brown: Part II

After a year and a half of intensive preparation, student reformers at Brown, led by BMOC Ira Magaziner, issued a 450- page report recommending extensive changes in the school's undergraduate curriculum. Their report was released in January, 1968; yet by June, it remained virtually unread.

This is the concluding portion of a two-part report on how educational reform was achieved at Brown, and what Brown's experience suggests about curriculum changes at Harvard.

MAGAZINER returned to school in the fall of 1968 determined not to allow his Report to lie about unread. Now a senior and "the head of everything at Brown," as one student put it, he and his followers organized themselves into what they called the Central Committee. They educated other students about the purposes of educational reform. They spoke in dorms, published a newsletter, and drew on their contacts to organize rallies of a thousand students in behalf of their curriculum proposals. They sought to see every professor in the University in his office to discuss the specifics of the Report.

The Report had no summary. "You knew they were really going to press you," one faculty member recalls, "and you had to read the whole damn thing."

Finally, in December, President Heffner appointed an extraordinary nine-member committee- headed by associate provost Paul F. Maeder- with a mandate to propose changes in educational philosophy and practice to the Faculty. Magaziner, Miss Friedman, and Friedel were named to the group, as was Eckelmann, an associate dean of Pembroke, and three professors.

The Maeder Committee published its Interim Report last April 10, and the faculty set May 5 for debate on its recommendations. The Report endorsed the Modes of Thought program, and the dropping of the old distribution system; but as a concession to anticipated faculty opposition, it included a requirement that all freshmen take at least a year's worth of MOT courses in each of the three areas of Humanities, Sciences, and Social Sciences, as well as a semester of math.

The Committee also endorsed the abolition of letter grading in favor of a complete satisfactory/no credit plan. In recognition of what the subsequent faculty legislation called the "considerable risks involved for the student who wants to enter graduate or professional school, were grades to be eliminated entirely at this time," the Report recommended the compilation of "dossiers" of student papers and essay exams.

The Maeder Report did not meet with universal approval. One faction of the faculty opposed the emphasis put on the student's "self-realization" in the statement of educational principles, which followed closely the Magaziner formulation. Another faction thought the MOT proposal too ambiguous. The managing editor of the Brown Daily Herald warned that "without a strict grading system, very little academic work would be accomplished." The reformers, he wrote, "have greatly overrated the real concern of the undergraduate at Brown."

THE politicking during this last stage of reform was intense. Student leaders (who participated in the final faculty debates) met in midnight strategy sessions, and got together another successful rally in support of their proposals. The faculty stayed in session three consecutive days (classes were canceled the second day), and, on May 8, voted to:

Endorse, in principle, a statement on undergraduate education which stressed equally the individual student's "intellectual" and "personal" growth;

Adopt the idea of ungraded Modes of Thought courses (for freshmen and sophomores) but discard the requirement that students take a certain number of them;

Allow students to take all their other courses on a satisfactory/no credit basis, but permit professors to give grades (A, B, C, NC) if students want to receive them;

Reduce the number of satisfactory semesters of work required for the A.B. degree from 30 to 28, and not record in students' files courses for which (for one reason or another) they receive no credit;

Retain the concept of concentration as "the focal point for a student's ... educational experience," but allow students to devise (in consultation with an appropriate member of the faculty) their own concentration programs centered on either a discipline or a "problem ... or broad question";

Omit all distribution requirements;

Encourage all students to undertake independent study (either alone or in groups) with the approval of a faculty sponsor who would be responsible for the evaluation of their work; and

Promote the creation of new University Courses.

The professors threw out the proposal that beginning students take a minimum number of MOT courses. One student reformer said in retrospect that the faculty wasn't willing to work out the 200 to 400 MOT courses that would have been required to make the plan work.

"They argued that we were asking them to eliminate all requirements, so we couldn't require MOT courses," this student continued. "But some younger professors realized that we were really asking for much more time spent on undergraduates and on teaching instead of research- and teaching is not generally highly regarded."

The "dossier" idea was considered impractical; instead, the faculty has made provision this fall for students to receive detailed Academic Performance Reports (APR's) from professors in courses in which they are especially interested or which form part of their preparation for graduate school. These reports are similar to graduate school recommendation forms; students hope that the APR's will be more meaningful to them than hastily assigned grades.

"Not a single one of the students," Dean Fokelmann said last week, "argued for less evaluation. They wanted more evaluation of a higher quality. They wanted to know more than just whether they could get a good grade on an exam."

HOW has reform worked out this year at Brown?

In many ways, of course, it's still too early to say. One of the original reformers Elliott Maxwell '68, was back at the campus before Christmas vacation and said that he was disappointed that he didn't see more "gleam" in student's eyes. "Students do not go for 12, 13, or 14 years under a graded system," Friedel says, "and then all of a sudden say 'Hey, the pressure's off, I can decide what's important myself.' The mentality is still there."

Still, there are impressive signs of undergraduate intellectual ferment in Providence.

Thirty-seven MOT courses were introduced this fall, and students signed up for them eagerly. There will be two dozen more in the spring. A student-faculty committee oversees the program.

The number of students enrolled in independent study has increased to more than 300- a tripling compared to the preceding semester, according to Eckelmann. More than a dozen groups of students are pursuing independent research in Group Independent Study Projects. One G.I.S.P. is studying "Revolution."

A new Concentrations Committee has approved about twenty original plans submitted by students. The Committee has two student advisors, and is encouraging all departments to revise the standard concentration programs.

Forty per cent of all undergraduates at Brown are taking all of their courses on a satisfactory/no credit basis. Freshman have taken advantage of the S/NC option most enthusiastically: 61 per cent are receiving no letter grades this term. Only 28 per cent of the seniors have gone over entirely to the new system.

FOR SENIORS, of course, the attitude of graduate and professional schools has been the biggest question about the pass/fail arrangement. One senior at Brown was told by two law school interviewers that they would suspect any student who reported his grades as "satisfactory" of trying to disguise his performance. An assistant professor here, who is a member of the admissions committee at the Kennedy School of Government, told a reporter last week that he doubted he could "take a chance" on an applicant who reported no grades "even if he had the soundest recommendations."

"You can only turn down so many straight A students," he said, "when you have hundreds of applicants for so few openings."

Like many students, Eckelmann worries about the response of graduate schools to what Brown has done. He says he is confident, however, that these schools will soon be putting greater emphasis on letters of recommendation and on the results of the Graduate Record and other standardized admissions examinations.

"Ten or twenty grades don't tell you more about a student than three or four written evaluations," he said last week. "The professional schools will find out which schools have devised appropriate mechanisms for evaluating their students; and if we can carry it off, we will have more meaningful evaluation at Brown than ever before."

Can Harvard, as it plans to revise its undergraduate curriculum, learn from Brown's experience?

Obviously, some parts of Brown's "reformed" curriculum are already established practice here.

This year, Harvard is offering 46 freshman seminars, which aim at giving students the advantage of close contact with Faculty members, and 37 lower-level General Education which, to a greater or lesser degree, try to acquaint students with the basic concepts and the nature of the intellectual problems of the humanities and the natural and social sciences.

It offers some interdisciplinary study in some upper-level Gen. Ed. courses, and the number of these has been increasing steadily in recent years. It offers some interdisciplinary concen-trations- Social Studies, for example. It could offer more.

There are already almost as many students, proportionally, doing independent study at Harvard as there are now at Brown- 409 this semester. It is even possible, Archie C. Epps, assistant dean of the College, said last week, for a group of students to work together on a project for credit; and last year some students in Adams House organized the equivalent of a G.I.S.P. on "The Film." But most students are not aware of the possibility of group independent study.

But Brown also answered for itself two fundamental questions which will need to be answered at Harvard before the process of curriculum reform is complete.

The first, and most important of these questions, was about the purposes of undergraduate education. "Education for the undergraduate," Brown's Faculty decided, should foster both "the intellectual and personal growth of the individual student." To cap the student's intellectual growth, Brown retained the concentration requirement. To encourage the student's "personal growth," Brown gave him the widest latitude in choosing the nature of his work, and acknowledged, as one faculty member wrote, "what has long been true in fact: that it is the student who must finally make something of the educational experience the university offers." For both reasons, it decided to do away with conventional letter-grading and to try to get students and faculty together in small group more frequently.

BROWN considered, and rejected the notion that the University should impose, by means of a "core curriculum" or a combination of required courses, any single idea of what a liberally educated person should "know." It also rejected the notion that the undergraduate should have no focus to his studies at all.

Can a college abolish the conventional restraints of required courses and letter-grades, while still requiring that a student focus his academic efforts? How much responsibility for both "intellectual" and "personal" growth can it leave to the students themselves? Brown has answered these questions; Harvard has not yet faced the problem.

The second fundamental question Brown answered was about the process of educational reform itself. "We were fortunate." Brown's dean said last week. "in having some brilliant undergraduates who did an awful lot." Students opened the debate about curriculum reform, and followed through both with painstaking research and with intelligent argument in committee meetings and in professors' offices, and- when necessary- outside them at demonstrations on the College Green.

Eckelmann could have said as well that Brown was fortunate in having administrators who accepted student initiatives as legitimate and who took students' concerns seriously. Almost from the start. Brown's administration helped students push reform through an often disinterested and sometimes suspicious faculty.

"We achieved radical ends," Susie Friedman says, "but we did it through orderly and established processes. A lot of this was due to the tradition established by Ira- that you could get things done if you did your homework."

Magaziner wouldn't allow himself all the credit, though. "I've sat down with a number of administrators here," he said last spring, "for hours and hours, where we started off at completely opposite ends, and, after enough talking, we could in most cases come to agreement. It was because they listened."