Farewell to Gen Ed

Say goodbye to a friend you never knew. Like the distant married cousin of the deceased, this year's freshman class finds itself in the unenviable position of a captive audience at the funeral of Harvad's dissipated system of General Education. Death came last spring after a prolonged illness--some would say that Gen Ed, as it is popularly known, never had a chance after it was rushed into life in a fit of post-World War II educational innovation--but it will be four years before a new program takes over completely. Until then the class of '82 will have to meet the non-concentration requirements of the Gen Ed program, while at the same time many of those very courses are being phased out of existence to make way for the much-ballyhooed Core Curriculum. It's sort of like burying the body before it's even cold--but then again, nobody ever said funerals were any fun.

Let's harken back to a happier time, if only for explantation's sake. In the 1940s then-President James B. Conant '14 initiated a reform of Harvard's undergraduate curriculum; his subsequent report, "General Education in a Free Society," eventually led to the adoption of a set of requirements that each student would have to take, in addition to courses in his or her concentration. The scheme was simple, at least on the surface: the range of disciplines was divided into the Social Sciences. Natural Sciences and Humanities (affectionately known as Soc Sci, Nat Sci and Hum), with the Committee on General Education offering introductory courses in each area. Each student would have to take two half-courses in two of the three areas--the two areas that were not related to his field of concentration. (An example, for the confused--in this case probably the majority: John decides to major in physics, which becomes his field of concentration. Because physics is a Natural Science, he must therefore take two Gen Ed courses in the Humanities, and another two in the Social Sciences. Easy? Oh, sure.) In addition, each student must ntake two further half-courses must cover higher-level material, and be offered by the respective departments instead of the Committee on Gen Ed. Further requirements, such as a foreign language and Expository Writing, only complicate the picture, as does the moderately Byzantine arrangement of partial and complete by-passes of the Gen Ed courses. And no road maps allowed, either.

As originally conceived, General Education was an attempt to give the student a general but still comprehensive intellectual background. Unfortunately, the system soon began to falter; as the number of Gen Ed courses multiplied, their relationship to the general, introductory goals of the program became more dubious. In recent years such courses as "The Films of Alfred Hitchcock" found their way into the Gen Ed listings -- while of undoubted intellectual merit (at least usually), they didn't quite seem designed to produce a class of Renaissance men and women. Moreover, certain other courses sprang up that appeared designed to accomodate the needs of specific clienteles: the Natural Science coruse, for instance, that would approach scientific issues from a philosophical or political perspective, or the Humanities course custom-built for the pocket-calculator, pre-med set. James Q. Wilson, Shattuck Professor of Government and chairman of the special Task Force that reported on the Gen Ed system two years ago said then that "We have never really abandoned the principle of General Education. But the present General Education guidelines are ineffective and worn down." The Task Force's report was a bit more biting: noting the number of Nat Sci courses that had sprung up to cater to the needs of non-science types, it concluded that the needs of non-science types, it concluded that the Nat Sci requirement "can be met in any number of way which insure that the student will not learn, or even observe from a safe distance, science."

That was when the gloves came off. The Task force's report set in motion the two-year sequence of events that culminated in last spring's Faculty vote to replace Gen Ed with a more detailed Core Curriculum. Henry Rosovsky, dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the architect of the Core proposal, calls the curriculum reform "an attempt to redirect the attention of the Faculty to the concerns of undergraduates"; others, such as Harrison C. White, professor of Sociology, termed it "a return to 1953 General Education," nothing more than a stiffening of existing requirements. The various arguments consumed the Faculty in formal debate for three months, and in behind-the-scenes politicking for more than a year. Polls showed that a majority of undergraduates opposed the Core, but student members of the Committee of Undergraduate Education--an advisory group--approved the plan. When the dust settled, Rosovsky had won the argument decisively--by staking his considerable prestige on the success of the plan, and by expertly compromising on nuts-and-bolts details with professors anxious to see their own specialites included in the required curriculum, the dean won a 182-65 victory.

The size of that margin tends to obscure the often sharp debate that the proposal produced among Faculty members. Opponents teed off on two key points. The first of these was based on the philosophical premise that no faculty is competent to judge what areas of knowledge constitute the "core" that is essential to a completely educated person. William H. Bossert '59, McKay Professor of Appplied Mathematics and author of a counter-proposal to thbe Core, poked fun at what he saw as the Core's attempt to eliminate ignorance in all areas. Said Bossert: "The summed ignorance of this particular Faculty is evidence that ignorance is debilitating neither professionally nor personally." However Bernard Bailyn, Winthrop Professor of History and another Core architect, who apparently does not care for Bossert's sense of humor, replied simply that the Core is not an attempt to survey all the major areas of knowledge," but instead a highlight of the most essential, "core" areas.

It was the process of selecting which areas should be included in the Core that raised a second group of objections. Wilson's task force had originally recommended an arrangement of five areas; by the time Bailyn and other members of the Faculty finished with the report, however, the five-step attack had undergone mitosis, not to mention a considerable mutation. The final Faculty Council report reshuffled Wilson's original five areas, and then split each in two--effectively making each student reponsible for a half-course in eight out of ten subdivisions of the Core. As in Gen Ed, the student would not have to take courses in the Core area affiliated with his or her field of concentration.

The five Core areas and their subdivisions are:

Literature and the Arts, divided into Literature, Fine Arts; Music and Contexts of Culture;

History, divided into Historical Orientation; Historical Process and Perspective;

Social and Philosophical Analyusis, divided into Social Analysis; Moral and Political Philosphy;

Science and Mathematics, divided into Physical Science and Mathematics; Biological and Behavioral Science; and

Foreign Languages and Cultures, divided into Western Europe (including language) or a major non-Western culture.

At present, the Core plan actually calls for students to take only one course in the last group, and three in Literature and the Arts, but this is subject to change. And while thus far no one has devised clever abbreviations for the areas to match the beloved Nat Sci, Soc Sci and Hum, the Faculty is establishing a four-year phasing-in period, which should allow plenty of time for such niceties later on.

During the course of the faculty debate, many professores complained that their fields had not been included in the Core; likewise, student groups objected to the plan's failure to include any provision allowing advanced students to by-pass the introductory-level courses of which the Core will most likely be composed. Rosovsky, in a move to graner support among groups that had first been hostile to the plan--notably professors in the natural sciences, who felt their disciplines were under-represented in the scheme of requirements--agreed to a "floater" amendment, which authorized the administrative Core Committees to study the possibility of switching one or more courses among different sub-areas. Most of the disgruntled professors joined the bandwagon as eagerly as if they had been firmly promised a spot in the Cote, rather than just that possibility. (Hope springs eternal, they say.) Likewise, another amendment authorized research into and experimentatin with a strictly regulated by-pass system--again, no promises were made, and the final decision was granted to the Core committees. Politicians call this type of maneuver "coalition-building"; others refer to it as "buck-passing." Either way, it worked.

The bottom line on the Faculty's vote, taken May 2, left the substantive development of the Core up to the Facylty standing committee and several subcommittees--all of whose members are to be appointed by Rosovsky. In a recent interview, the dean said he has spent the summer conferring with faculty members and administrators, and intends to name the committee members by the time classes begin in September. "People think I moved slowly on these things, but that is the way I prefer it," he says adding that he has spent most of his time weighing the appointment of the committee chairmen. The size of the committees is another point yet to be decided: "They have very large consitiuencies, so they obviously can't be too small." Rosovsky estimated that he will appoint a minimum of five members to each subcomittee, not including the chairman and non-voting student membe5rs who will sit on each one.

The Faculty's timetable for implementatioin of the Core calls for the committee to begin offering the first Core courses in the fall of 1979. From then on the number of Core coureses will increase as standard Gen Ed offerings decrease in number, or are incorporated into the Core program. By the time the Class of '82 are seniors, they will have very few Gen Ed holdovers from which to choose; this menas that they must choose carefully when to take the courses that will fulfill the Gen Ed requirements, as the same offerings may not be around for long. "In essence they have the choice of availing themselves of either program," Rosovsky says.

Nonetheless, the transition from Gen Ed to Core involves a careful study of which courses might fit the detailed guidlines the Faculty has prescribed for Core courses. The final say on this rests with the Core committees; however, Edward T. Wilcox, director of General Education, is in the middle of a preliminary study that shows that close to half the approximately 100 Gen Ed courses might, with modifications, qualify for inclusion in the Core. "This is clearly just a ballpark figure," he warns, stressing that the study is aimed mainly at determining fiscal effects of the increased teaching load that could result from the Core's implementation. Still, he notes that some courses--mostly introductory courses in the Natural Sciences "clearly meet the Faculty's relatively explicit criteria." Others, including offerings in the Humanities on film and related topics, "clearly don't make it," he says. After concluding his evaluation of courses now under Gen Ed, Wilcox will begin a study of departmental coureses that might also meet the Core requirements.

Wilcox foresees that the greatest problem in implementing the Core will be to finding enough teaching fellows to staff the newlycreated Core courses. "The resources simply aren't there," he says--a fact that stems from decreasing enrollment in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. The pool of perspective teaching fellows there "just about down to zip." he adds.

Rosovsky, however, looks to the next four years as a time for learning, a period when the Core committees can experiment with various options and modify the basic proposal. Calling the Faculty's vote authorizing the Core plan "an IOU from the Faculty to the students," he makes it clear that the obligation will be fully repaid only when Harvard undergraduates have a completely revamped curriculum. It is a debt that the dean will go to great lengths to honor