Are Undergraduates Worth the Trouble?

EDWARD L. PATULLO`S " The Case for a Different Kind of Harvard which appears in the December Harvard Alumni Bulletin is a confused plea for a noble cause rational policy making at Harvard according to a consistent educational philosophy Patullo be director of the Center for Behavioral Sciences maintains that Harvard's most important function is the generation of knowledge followed closely by the training of additional "Scholar-teachers". Undergraduate instruction "complements and supports" these functions, but should be designed and conducted only with Harvard's more important goal in mind "the goal of maintaining a maximally productive group of research scholars as members of its faculty."

Patullo's proposal rests on several observations which seem true enough. More and more institutions are available to provide instruction. Undergraduate education has become as complex an undertaking that teaching skills are required beyond those needed for pursuit of original research. It's not clear that Harvard has better teachers than other places. It is clear that we have bigger libraries. If Harvard is to justify its existence in terms of a unique social contribution in an ever-more specialized system of higher education, Patullo reasons. It must do what it does best, allow people to do research.

In many ways, Patullo is merely articulating start many Faculty members and administrators them to have believed for sometime, that given the social value of research and the importance of the scholar's role, the only people who should be at Harvard are willing apprentices to the great minds. Patullo suggests choosing a smaller undergraduate body, academically able, but also having definite motivation toward academic pursuit. Don't worry about extracurricular life, he assures us. There are bound to be would be scholars interested also in journalism and sports.

Patullo notes that the increasing financial commitment to graduate education he recommends might force Harvard to accept only undergraduates able to pay full tuition. But "An undemocratic Harvard College. . . would do serious injustice to no one," and certainly less harm. Patullo claims than the waste of available resources for original scholarship.

FROM ONE perspective, it is easy to sympathize with Patullo's frustration in the face of Harvard's haphazard planning. President Bok's fund for innovation in education is a convenient case in point.

Established with grants from the Mellon and Norman Foundations, the fund was set up explicitly to finance experiments in undergraduate instruction despite what Bok recognized as a lack of any single animating philosophy of education that gives order to our curriculum." With the assistance of Dean Whitla director of the Office of lests. Bok picked several projects to subsidize, experiments in the modes of undergraduate instruction and in teaching graduate students how to teach. Although Whitla actively solicited proposals from Faculty members, so few ambitious projects meeting Bok's standards were submitted that money was left over. No student inittaded proposal, including a plan to permit a small group of freshmen to plan a four-year program without formal distribution requirements was considered worthy of support'. Each was deemed too broad or foe nebulous in its intentions.

At this point, the pilot projects appear to be successful. Paul Bamberg associate professor of Physics has further developed his mixture of lectures and self paced instruction Regina Kyle, assistant professor of English has organized a resource center for teaching fellows in the humanities which she believes to be the first of its kind. Elisabeth Allison, assistant professor of Economics, has instituted in several Fc 10 sections a self-pacing program which could have especially unusual implications. Not only is her program a unique attempt to escape the lecture rehash formal in the social sciences but it has resulted in a more egalitarian system of teaching Section leaders seem to be spending more time now with students having difficulty with economics and less with students better able to advance in the subject on their own. A number of interdisciplinary House courses have also been set up through the fund, and proposals for future experiments include a plan Whitla is developing for off-campus learning and student travel abroad.

Unfortunately, these projects head in no clear direction. While there is something attractive in running a number of experiments to get as broad a picture as possible of improvements that might "work" there is no assurance that the promising aspects of these experiments will be supported again and expanded upon. The scope of possible proposals becomes necessarily restricted, and proposals which plan significant changes in the relationship between students and instructors, between students and the departments or between one department and another must appear too broadly conceived. And this absence of "a single animating philosophy" does not mean a value-free system. Rather, as Patullo states, Harvard remains guided by a "strong sense of tradition and basic commitment to educational excellence" of I would add, a particularly elitist and custom-bound sort.

HOWEVER, Patullo's particular plan would undermine the very quality of independence that is the foundation of vigorous, scholarship and the supposedly unfettered exploration of ideas. It is only through a university's commitment to teaching and to developing people as people, regardless of their particular academic interests or social and economic background, that it can hope to provide any moral leadership for society of to urge people to pursue unexplored avenues of thought.

Patullo's plan would further reduce Harvard to the status of academic servant to a dehumanized social system, a debilitating position it is already assuming more and more. What Patullo calls Harvard's symbiotic relationship with leading echelons of American society." In fact, describes why American destruction of Indochina, has from the outset, been supervised by Harvard professors.

"The vastly increased social and economic importance of scientific discovery" reflects most of all American capitalism's increasingly more explicit reliance on technologists and social scientists to maintain adequate social control. Patullo defends his ideas by evoking, almost quaintly, the image of eager, wide-eyed, value-free scholarship:

The best scholars must, inevitably, give their own studies first priority--and in general. I believe, are most successful with those students who already share their intense interest in learning for its own sake.

But a scant three pages later, he gets caught in his own contradiction: ". . .members of scholarly faculties. . . must in future be willing to exchange work on mission-oriented research" for financial support. In other words, Harvard is to finance its "Independent" pursuit of knowledge by working for the government--hardly a sensible or "harmlessly" undemocratic idea.

Ironically, Patullo recognizes that Universities have more in common with churches than they do with factories. But he is willing to allow universities to forego their traditional moral and intellectually broadening roles for the sake of that greater economics and social rationalization that is narrowing function of the churches to the point of non-existence. Of course, universities "are socially created and serve social purposes," but to serve more slavishly the purpose of a decaying society spiritual impotence and institutional extinction. Harvard's mode of instruction may be outdated; its sexist and elitist values are outdated. The answer is to develop a broader undergraduate experience more is keeping with the complexity and instability of American life, not a more specialized experience within a narrow by defined academic realm.

Harvard needs a consistent educational philosophy which encompasses Harvard's place in society and its commitment to its students--to avoid either stagnation in old, customs or suicide through over-specialization. At stake is not merely the short-term rational use of Harvard's resources, but Harvard's long-term usefulness not only to scholars-but to all human society.