Changing the Rules

IN A PLACE as laden with committees churning out reports as Harvard, it's hard to take reviews of policy very seriously--they go on all the time, after all, and nothing much seems to change. The wise governance of a review committee here probably involves, in fact, not making too many promises about results for fear that they will not materialize.

Dean Rosovsky, who knows the ropes, accordingly spent more than a year after he announced he would undertake a massive study of undergraduate education here downplaying that study. He repeatedly denied he was taking on something of the scope of a similar study (known as the Redbook) in the 40s, by the Committee on General Education in a Free Society, that had had huge national reverberations. This, Rosovsky maintained, was just an in-house program, designed to pinpoint specific flaws in Harvard College and then go about solving them. If anything more sublime emerged, fine. If not, also fine.

All this is not to imply that Rosovsky was awshucksing his review to the point of deception; rather, that he was unsure--and therefore cautious about just how far-reaching the results of the study would be.

Now, however--it seems to have happened over the summer--all that has changed. In an interview this fall, Rosovsky said that when he first conceived of the review, "I could see lots of undergraduate problems, but I shied away from the Redbook's philosophical task. I wanted to concentrate on nuts and bolts." But Rosovsky said he has since shifted his focus. "I now also think," he said, "that maybe a broader statement is necessary, and we will certainly try to make one. It's chancy, very difficult, but necessary."

The change seems to have resulted partly from Rosovsky's confidence, once the study got going, that it was actually going to accomplish things. That the various task forces carrying out the study have the potential to make major statements, though, is less important than their feeling that such a statement is needed. Rosovsky and the committee members' mere perception of that need says several interesting things--that Harvard's problems are not unique to Harvard; that there is in fact some sort of national drift in undergraduate education; and that the American educational community is sufficiently unified and reverent of Harvard that a major directive from Cambridge would be listened to with utmost seriousness across the country.

IN HIS LETTER to the faculty on undergraduate education, which served as a prospectus and grand opening for the review, Rosovsky hinted a couple of times at what he sees as the present drift of American college education. The past decade, he wrote, has not been lacking in educational changes, but those changes often came about as a result of social and political, rather than academic, issues. The reforms produced were frequently of "a hurried and peicemeal character," and they brought about a rootless, drifting academy:

Students no less than faculty have demanded the freedom to pursue their own interests with minimal constraint. To a large extent, curricular and other reforms in recent years have responded to this laissez-faire impulse. One consequence is a growing sense that all constraints are arbitrary, and that all choices are of equal merit.

Certainly the kinds of changes Rosovsky was talking about have been happening across the country. There has been a general loosening of constraints across a set of issues that ranges from abolition of required courses to pass-fail grading to even the disappearance of dormitory rules that governed students' personal lives. All the changes did come about in part out of students' interests in as much freedom as possible, but that in turn was based on an assumption that, given the greatest possible latitude, students would be able to make the best possible choices at college. There may have been another element as well: if there is general agreement that the rules of the game no longer make sense, people are left with a choice between developing a new consensus and a new set or rules, or abolishing the existing ones. Most colleges chose the latter.

ROSOVSKY'S FEELING seems to be that if his committees think about it they will eventually be able to make enough sense of the world to develop a new set of rules that will make sense themselves. And that means a move away from great personal freedom for students, toward a more directed education. Asked about it this fall, Rosovsky said he couldn't speak for the review in general but that personally he has found the recent educational drift "worrisome." "I'm not in sympathy with the totally unformed undergraduate education that has developed over the last ten years," he said.

All this is evidence of the earliest and most sketchy sort, but a pattern seems to emerge: Rosovsky's committees will endeavor to remake the strictures on undergraduates in a modern mode, and to see to it that the new strictures are spread, at least in spirit, as broadly as possible across the land. What those strictures will be is far harder to judge--stricter grading policies, perhaps, and more requirements. Maybe the requirements will directly reflect modern society--more science, more economics, more on the third world--or perhaps they will stress basic writing and analytic skills. They are likely, however, to be based on a view of students as more generally alike than the current system implies they are, more likely to benefit from similar experiences, more in search of knowledge about ideas and things than about themselves. No doubt whoever is going to Harvard when all this happens will accept it, and no doubt high school seniors will continue to clamor to become whatever it is Harvard wants to try to make of them. But there is more on the line than that now: the question is not so much whether Rosovsky can remake Harvard College as whether when he speaks, America will listen.