The Mail EDUCATION AND MONEY

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

Neither the CRIMSON nor my friend Professor Riesman seems to have understood the point I tried to make on October 20 during the faculty meeting's discussion of curriculum reform. Since this point is, I think, of some importance, allow me to restate it here. All of the administrative items raised in Dean May's progress report on curriculum review seem to me to embody and entail basic conceptions about undergraduate education at Harvard. It seems to me intellectually and practically wrong to take up these items piecemeal without having first discussed the basic issues and defined an overall design.

Fundamentally, what is at stake is not simply a matter of requirements, special programs, etc., but an educational model. Is the traditional Harvard model-based on a highly intellectual conception of education appropriate to a certain kind of elite-really applicable to a body of students much more diverse than in the past, and much more ambivalent toward this conception, impatient of prolonged dependency and separation from the outside world?

If we have no money for changes, we should be candid about it. If we want to preserve the old model, then we should adapt admissions accordingly. If on the contrary (as I think we should) we want to adopt a new model, and take into account student trends toward part-time outside involvement, we must see to it that intellectual substance be preserved, so that in all the new and multiple programs there be a core, if not of common knowledge, at least of questions and methods of thought.

It would be much better to face this central issue directly and then only, after we have given an answer, to work on the resulting administrative details. The alternative is the very unsatisfactory one of fragmentary changes that disfigure the old model without however corresponding to any well-conceived new design. In other words I was arguing against a certain procedure, and not at all against the substance of the proposal on special concentrations.