The Task Forces Teeter Along

This is the final installment in a series of features on issues that face Harvard this spring.

February 11, 1974--It was a strange setting for a major policy declaration. Sitting beneath the ornate crystal chandeliers supposedly expropriated from Eliot House by former Harvard President Abbott Lawrence Lowell (1877), savoring steak and red wine at tables uncustomarily covered with white linen, several hundred Lowell House residents strained to hear the extemporaneous remarks of the fledgling dean of the Faculty, Henry Rosovsky.

Although his audience probably expected the blather that educators prefer to hide behind, Rosovsky instead proceeded to announce a move that stands today as one of the most prominent decisions of his two - and - one - half-year tenure: "I think that Harvard College needs a new Redbook. It is time to reestablish a consensus that will last another 20 years." The comment by the Japanese - economics - professor - turned - dean, stated in a level, dispassionate voice, meant little or nothing to students gathered in the lofty dining hall. But it set off a wholesale review of undergraduate education that is just now, two years after Rosovsky's Lowell House remarks, beginning to emerge into concrete proposals.

More than three decades earlier President James B. Conant '14 had set out a similar goal, naming a dozen Harvard and Radcliffe Faculty members and administrators to a panel pretentiously called the "University Committee on the Objectives of a General Education in a Free Society." The committee's 1945 report greatly influenced the course of college education in the United States, outlining proposals for general education courses and requirements as they exist at Harvard and many other colleges today. The report's basic premise holds that there is a core of knowledge essential to a citizen in a free society and that it is the function of general education to provide that core.

But the report--known at Harvard as the "Redbook," after the color of its binding--has turned brown with age. Various Faculty and administration moves have chipped away at the educational temple that was erected along the lines of the Redbook's blueprint, and as President Bok admitted on the night Rosovsky made his announcement undergraduate education at Harvard no longer has "a very clear focus or set of objectives."

In his first move to generate discussion, Rosovsky presented the Faculty in October 1974 a 22 - page letter on the present state of undergraduate education. Perhaps mindful of tradition, Rosovsky also labeled the document by the color of its binding, but with a practical twist, dubbing it "The Yellow Pages." The letter, which outlines principal flaws and hints at possible revisions in undergraduate education, also declares Rosovsky's intention to establish "one or more faculty committees that will share with me the task of seeking broadly satisfactory answers" to questions the dean raised in the letter.

That intention was realized late last spring, when seven committees were finally set up, each consisting of six Faculty members, two students and one administrator, each mandated to explore a specific aspect of Harvard's undergraduate education.

But Rosovsky's comments in the Yellow Pages honed in on such specific problems that the letter left considerable confusion over his goal: Was it a Redbook Redux or merely a compendium of detailed and thus ephemeral and short - term revisions? Rosovsky himself acknowledges that he has switched intentions: "There is no contradiction, I've just changed my mind. I began with a notion that there were lots of things we could clearly do better that if we fixed up six to eight quite obvious problems it would justify the effort. I have come to realize more is needed." Rosovsky now says Harvard "needs an overall vision of undergraduate education." He declines to use the word philosophy. "It's so pretentious," he explains.

Although Rosovsky fathered the current educational review, he has until recently remained in the shadows, giving the task forces what he calls "an opportunity to thrash around." But in the last few weeks Rosovsky has assumed the role of the country doctor, making rounds for both social and remedial purposes. "I ask what the task forces are doing and suggest things they might do, I try really to act as a friendly critic," he says. Rosovsky, in regard to the health of the task forces, says he has diagnosed "relatively good progress." Still, a review of the seven ad hoc bodies indicates that while some are moving steadily toward making recommendations, otheres have faltered seriously. Reports on each of the task forces follow:

Core Curriculum

"To determine what common intellectual experience should be required of all students and what particular skills should be expected of all students."

Of all the seven task forces "The Yellow Pages" set in motion, the core curriculum panel faces perhaps the most challenging assignment. It must, in effect, pass judgment on the Redbook itself and come to some conclusion as to the general education foundation erected here after 1945.

Chairman James Q. Wilson, Shattuck Professor of Government, cautions against second - guessing the task force's intentions: It remains "far from clear," he says, "whether the panel will endorse maintenance of some core. Core curriculum is in our name, but with a question mark," Wilson said, shaping a question mark in the air with his finger, as he talked to a reporter last week.

An aura of mystery surrounds the deliberations of the committee. Wilson and other members refuse to discuss its progress. And, according to a member of another task force, the core curriculum group has virtually sequestered itself like a jury to avoid upsetting a fragile equilibrium-- at the outset, its members were split between abolishing gen ed and distribution requirements and expanding them. The task force has refused a request for a joint meeting from the concentrations committee, but Wilson says the rejection was not the result of a fear of tipping any balance. Instead, he says, "it is pointless to have a joint meeting when the purpose of such a meeting could not be served, because the task force has not decided what to do."

Wilson says he has been struck at the panel's bi-weekly meetings by the members' willingness to "take a fresh look" at the value of a core curriculum. While all the members of his panel are mindful of the Redbook, which is mandatory reading, they "do not feel bound by it or bound to challenge it," Wilson says. Yet such openmindedness creates tactical problems, Wilson adds; the task force must also pay attention to the politics of feasibility. It has to, he says, perform the "perplexing tightrope act of balancing daring proposals against possible restraints on their implementation--the greatest of those restraints being the Faculty.

Pedagogical Improvement

"To consider how the learning environment can be improved. To review new techniques of teaching..."

Wilga M. Rivers, professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and chairman of the task force, says she doesn't think the job of her task force is to create new teaching philosophies and schemas, explaining that "the fantastic things you come up with, like Space Odyssey 1999, you can be sure will be voted down and sit on the top shelf in the archives." Rivers says she prefers to "move from where you are" and to work in sync with what will be accepted.

Given this pragmatic approach, the force is working to uncover new techniques that will improve teaching quality and to develop a system to evaluated teaching ability. Although the group has yet to agree on specific recommendations, one member recently said that, most likely, three proposals will surface later this month: that a "good" evaluation of teaching be utilized; that a person be hired in each department, on the merit of his or her teaching ability, to oversee pedagogy in his field; and, that teaching facilities be made available to assist sectionmen in improving their abilities.

But the committee member emphasizes the main thrust will probably be toward changing attitudes among Faculty members that tend to de-emphasize teaching. Whether through money incentives or mandatory classes, the member said, somehow professors must "be taught" the importance of teaching.

Still, as a student member of the committee who is now frustrated by its work says, the task force's goal is a bit intangible.

Concentrations

"To review the role of concentrations in the curriculum and define their educational purpose."

After a semester of weekly meetings and research, the task force on concentrations has moved into final debate on such questions as the fate of elite majors and the shape of the general guidelines the panel will recommend for concentrations. While the task force will not take on the Faculty establishment by proposing the abolition of concentrations and a return to the pre-Redbook electives system, it will inevitably encroach on the traditionally autonomous Harvard departments.

Such trespass will probably be minor in the concentration guidelines, according to Chairman Paul C. Martin '52, chairman of the Physics Department. But the panel could conceivably suggest opening up the limited concentrations, a move that would be resisted by some if not all of the elites. History and Literature, for one, has already testified before the task force against a change, arguing, according to one task force member, with a certain "historical pomposity" that the concentration was the first elite and that it should therefore be left intact.

On the nitty gritty level, the task force has already moved to request revisions in the descriptions of concentrations in Rules Relating. This would hopefully, Martin says, put freshmen in a better position to assess how much individual attention they are likely to receive in each department. The task force will also consider how to establish means of evaluating departments.

Martin, who admitted half-seriously in an interview last week that part of the panel's job is to make any radical proposals look less radical, believes it is important for Harvard departments to "recognize that the number who will replicate us [as university faculty] is much smaller than in the past." The task force, then, is aiming to see how concentrations could be designed to "develop skills that are transferrable and aren't as evanescent as a particular set of facts or subject matter," Martin said.

Educational Resources

"To determine the teaching resources available to the Faculty. To study how existing resources can be best utilized..."

With the Faculty absorbed in Cost Consciousness III, this task force could prove to be the prime determinant of whether the proposals of the other task forces can be put into effect. It, to be blunt, is dealing with bucks-and-brains allocation. But the committee has made little headway, with its meetings about every month confined to discussions of what data should collected. The task force has as yet made few or no moves to set up a system for evaluating the relative merit of various ways of allocating teaching resources.

One member of the task force, George F. Carrier, Coolidge Professor of Applied Mathematics, maintains that this "slightly anomalous" task force must wait until the other six have prepared their recommendations before it can make its final comments or report. This approach has angered at least one member, E. Scott Gilbert '76, who disagrees that the task force should be what he calls a "technical, nuts and bolts panel." Gilbert believes the task force must face up to value judgments and, in particular, consider how to balance the value of good teaching against the traditional benchmarks of scholarship, research and publication. But up to this point, Gilbert says, he has felt frustrated: "I have no sense of any timing at all. I walked out of the last meeting wondering what's happening."

The task force's wait-and-see attitude may be due for a change, however. In his recent visit to the committee, Rosovsky encouraged it to move ahead and not restrict its inquiries to narrow budgetary questions, according to several members.

Rhinoceros or Mouse?

Clearly, Rosovsky is determined to produce another Redbook. But in a departure from Conant's example, he has consciously chosen not to hinge his magnum opus on the work of a prestigious group of wise men. "We avoided that from the very beginning, we don't operate that way," Rosovsky says, even though he specifically mentioned creating a "blue-ribbon" panel in his February 1974 announcement. By creating the task forces, Rosovsky says, he hoped to gather as many ideas as possible ("they are one of the hardest things to get") and to develop a broad base of support in the Faculty for proposed changes. The task forces include about 50 administrators and faculty members. "If they agree," Rosovsky says, "it's a good basis on which to go ahead."

Forseeing that seven distinct task forces studying seven artifically divided areas would inevitably result in some overlap, Rosovsky also created a coordinating committee that he chairs. The panel includes all of the task force chairmen, President Bok and Francis M. Pipkin, associate dean of the Faculty. While the monthly meetings of the panel are now intended to prevent individual task forces from "barking up the wrong tree," according to one administrator, ultimately, the committee will attempt to synthesize the task forces' recommendations. Rosovsky stresses that the committee will work by consensus. "It's not a matter of a 7-6 Supreme Court decision," he says. "In the last analysis, one opinion will find a certain amount of favor."

Some task force members fear that failure to reach agreement in the task forces and coordinating committee could throw the final educational decisions into Rosovsky's lap, rendering worthless years of work and the dean's carefully devised system. Rosovsky rejected this notion ("I hope you don't have an army view of the way things work") and insists that, although he is chairman of the coordinating panel, each of its members has an equal voice. And to act by fiat, Rosovsky adds, would only be to doom his efforts to failure: "This faculty is self-governing in educational matters, unless you can convince them a proposal makes sense, it won't go."

Wilson, whose task force on core curriculum may generate the most controversial proposals, believes that Rosovsky's filtering system simply recognizes the largest problem of the educational review--carving proposals that the Faculty "will support enthusiastically and put time into." If Rosovsky had sent proposals to the Faculty "cold turkey," Wilson says, the dean would have risked the fate of the Doty committee, which reviewed undergraduate education in the '60s--with little lasting success.

"Moving the Faculty," Wilson says, "is like pushing a wet string--if you don't persuade everyone simultaneously, you will fail." It was a failure to recognize the Law of the Wet String that brought a swift demise to the reviews of undergraduate education at Yale and Princeton in the early 1970s. Both hinged on the work of a single blue-ribbon committee, and both faltered when they tried to gain faculty approval.

Although Rosovsky says he has never read these schools' reports ("I try to focus on the local problem"), he has set up a system that he hopes is free of their flaws. But in his concern about an ultimate Faculty rejection, Rosovsky failed to confront the weaknesses of his task force subdivisions.

With no clear delineation of their charges under Rosovsky's piecemeal approach, the task forces have faltered. In some, the open agenda has led to delay, with task forces spending weeks debating schedules and peripheral issues. There is also a pervasive confusion about deadlines and other procedural questions, and the amorphous mandates that Rosovsky offered have immobilized several of the panels. Frozen by uncertainty about the precise boundaries of their jurisdiction, these panels have often deferred to one another in potential areas of overlap--thus narrowing their approach all the more. Finally, the task forces remain uncertain about what kind of recommendations Rosovsky wants and find themselves torn between the abstract and the specific.

Despite the confusion, Rosovsky remains confident that the panels will finalize their proposals by the end of the year, in time for an intensive, summer-long effort to compile and distill a Rosovsky Redbook. Rosovsky says he hopes to be ready to offer his specific recommendations to the Faculty next fall and at the same time to complete a philosphical declaration, which he does not expect the Faculty to vote on. "One does not legislate exhortation. Whatever statement we make is not something to vote on. The actual legislation may be dry, but it must fit into some scheme," Rosovsky says.

In explaining why he now wants an "overall vision," Rosovsky the dean becomes Rosovsky the scholar. The Redbook, he says, was "written at a high point in American confidence, at a high point of American history. At the end of World War II, the Pax Americana was just beginning to develop, and America had an enormous amount of self-confidence. It felt it was beyond doubt the best of all possible societies." But today, he adds, "it's a different world, with a lot of confusion and self-doubt. The values of liberal education are much in question."

But, as Rosovsky realizes, the breadth of any vision of liberal education he eventually comes up with cannot alone effect wholesale revision of undergraduate education at Harvard. Wilson, who recognizes both the uncertainty and potential of the review, says that no one can promise that "the mountain will not labor and bring forward a mouse.

"I can't say that won't happen, but I can say the mountain is laboring. It's as easy to say that it will bring forth a rhinoceros as a mouse. But whether the faculty will accept a rhinoceros is another question."

Advising and Counseling

To explore the role of the Houses, the Faculty, and others in advising. To review what sources of information students have about employment, graduate school and careers ..."

President Horner says her task force on advising will look into the overall problem of counseling, or what she calls "the dissonance between expectations and experiences at Harvard."

The task force has produced a plethora of both feasible and unfeasible ideas. The group recently voted unanimously in favor of four-year Houses, even though it's highly unlikely that the four-year proposal will be adopted. However, there have been numerous more practical suggestions. After months of tangling with the housing issue, the committee advanced to its more specific task and began to study the particular problems confronting the different classes.

Potential recommendations from the group include placing sophomore advisors in the Houses or hiring assistant senior tutors assigned to advising sophomores and coordinating advising in the Houses and departments to bring together a student's academic and social life.

A member of the group, who asked not to be identified, said recently the participants have agreed that the proctorial system of the freshman year "seems to work" and won't need radical changes. Additionally, the group has decided that any further centralization in the now limited counseling network "would create just another bureaucratic monster on campus," the committee member said.

Working in the shadow of the recent Strauch Report, this committee is finding it difficult to determine exactly what its role should be and what possible needs may have arisen in the few months since the implementation of the report.

Student Body Composition

"To review the present composition of the student body and to assess what alternatives are possible and what alterations might be made."

Working in the shadow of the recent Strauch Report, this committee is finding it difficult to determine exactly what its role should be and what possible needs may have arisen in the few months since the implementation of the report.

After examining in detail the admissions process and the composition of the class, the group is "still hoping new ideas will come up," John K. Fairbank '29, Higginson Professor of History, chairman of the committee, says, adding that "the Strauch report was so recent I really don't know if we can advance on it."

Equal access, one of the more salient issues in the admissions world, finds support in the committee, as does the admissions committee's basic premise that a diverse class is its ultimate aim. The group seems to be at a standstill presently, agreeing on the broad concepts and still too unaware of the admissions process to offer specific suggestions. As one committee member describes the situation, "We're just talking in shades of grey."

College Life

"To consider the extra-curricular educational responsibility of the College."

Responding to Dean Rosovsky's request for recommendations on the "housing issue," the Committee on College Life spent its first few months wrestling with the problem only to throw the question back to the Committee on Houses and Undergraduate Life unresolved. Getting a late start on its own work, the group adopted the remise that change is imperative and "started hacking it out," a member says.

The group, chaired by Stephen Williams, Peabody Professor of American Archeology and Ethnology, is divided into three sub-committees, each analyzing one aspect of college life in the Houses. The sub committees will discuss formal education, such as House courses and sections, informal education, such as student-faculty interaction, and facilities and extra-curricular activities in the Houses.

The subcommittees are still in the collection stage, members say, sifting "through all the statistics you might ever want to read." Although the committees appear to be moving toward a defined goal now, the emphasis of the group has shifted. Perhaps because so much time was spent on housing options throughout the fall, the task force will not be able to study in depth the position of the arts and athletics at Harvard beyond how they relate specifically to the Houses.Stephen Williams