While Venerable Gen Ed Withers

"Any educational reform has a half-life," says Edward T. Wilcox. "It's a natural running down--an entropy that just seems inevitable."

Wilcox, director since the mid-1960's of Harvard's ever-dwindling General Education program, has watched the great curricular reform of the 1940s grind to a finish. Gen Ed was to the 1940s what the Core will be to the 80s. Another educational scheme in a dynastic cycle. Another reform that burst out of the gate and lost it past the clubhouse turn. It's hardly a new story.

"Back in the 19th century," Wilcox says, there existed at Harvard the idea that "a 17-year-old man was the best judge of what he should take." It seemed a fitting notion in a day when all knowledge was supposedly contained in the infamous five-foot shelf of classics, which began with the Bible and worked its way through the Hellenic myths and Shakespeare, Milton and Faust. Robert Benchley sat in the Harvard Club of Boston after his graduation determined to make his way through the whole 60 inches. He confessed it was nearly impossible, and concluded it was probably better just to read the beginning and the end.

All of this changed when A. Lawrence Lowell assumed Harvard's presidency and instituted the system of concentrations and distribution requirements: suddenly 17-year-old men fell from grace when it came to choosing their own courses, supplanted by a labyrinth of departments, sub-departments, inter-departments, advisors and tutors. This system stayed in effect until the second World War, when Harvard made another one of its great educational leaps forward.

It was a leap that began in 1945, when a line of people over half a mile long lined up in New York City to buy the symbol of the new post-war age--the ball point pen. Everyone, it seemed, wanted to be modern, and a pen that could write upside down (as well as under water) certainly seemed a step in the right direction. That same year, Harvard got into the modern act as well, as a committee to study the curriculum began to meet.

That committee published its findings, presumably drafted in ball-point, in the now out-of-print "Red Book" which quickly became a model for educational reform. The fact that the University of Chicago and Columbia had already been using an almost identical program for years didn't seem to bother the press and the public, who quickly saw in the "Red Book" a "breakthrough" in undergraduate teaching. "Columbia and Chicago had gotten into Gen Ed years before," Wilcox says, "but we copied it--and we got all the credit."

Harvard, however, made minor changes in the Red Book report. Instead of requiring each and every student to take a particular course in three different areas (as Columbia with its gargantuan Western Civilization still does), Harvard's system offered four courses in each of three areas: the Humanities, the Natural Sciences and the Social Sciences. In addition to concentration and distribution requirements, a student had to take one full course in each of these three areas. Much like the Core, Gen Ed was debated for a year and finally bestowed on the class of 1950. The idea was to give every student some sort of shared intellectual experience, an idea that Wilcox admits was "fairly sound."

Problems, however, soon began cropping up. First there was a slow but steady proliferation of Gen Ed courses, which expanded the areas in which Gen Ed operated but also destroyed some of the elements of intellectual sharing. "It began to be undermined almost immediately," says Wilcox. An even bigger problem occured when scientists, dismayed by the historical focus of the Natural Science offerings, proposed and saw passed the first Gen Ed detour--a bypass which allowed science concentrators to fulfill their Gen Ed requirements within their own departments.

Still, Gen Ed managed to survive intact until almost 1964 when another educational reform committee was set up--this one chaired by Paul M. Doty, now Mallinckrodt Professor of Biochemistry--and found that the steadily expanding list of Gen Ed courses were too elementary and not experimental enough, and proposed a series of reforms to make Gen Ed more modern and more exciting. Another year-long debate ensued.

"Then in one of those crazy moments on the Faculty floor," Wilcox says, "they voted to continue General Education and to liberalize it, while at the same time rejecting the reforms proposed by the Doty committee. When the smoke cleared," Wilcox adds, "it was, at best, a confusing mandate."

Still, because of that vote, the courses offered in the Gen Ed program became steadily more eclectic and experimental. Courses on everything from Pericles to silent comedies became part of Gen Ed, courses which, Wilcox notes, were very good in their own way but were sometimes educational refugees. "They were a lot of good courses which didn't fit into any particular department," Wilcox says. "They were courses without a home. They didn't have a lot in common." Shared intellectual experience had largely gotten lost in the shuffle. As Wilcox says, "Even though there were, and still are some pretty good courses in Gen Ed--they have absolutely no relation to the Red Book."

By the early 70s, the courses in General Education were diffuse enough that further bypasses, in the Humanities and the social Sciences, were proposed and passed to augment the Sciences bypass--and suddenly everybody had the option of ignoring General Education altogether, simply by taking two courses in any department instead of a Gen Ed offering.

By then, of course, another retrograde idea was dusted off and heralded as the next great undergraduate breakthrough--and in 1975, 30 years after Conant's committee had prepared the Red Book, the Core was formulated. When Dean Rosovsky's committee came to the conclusion that Gen Ed had degenerated into a gut-filled abyss, it formulated a plan which divided knowledge into not three but five general areas of study; Literature and Arts, Historical Study, Social Analysis and Moral Reasoning, Science, and Foreign Cultures. By the time it is fully implemented for the class of 1986, each student will have to take eight half course from among the 100 or so courses spread out in these five areas. The goal? According to Rosovsky's 1978 report on the Core Curriculum, it is to "have students acquire basic literacy in major forms of intellectual discourse." A sort of shared intellectual discourse, if you will. Gen Ed, which has grown ever more truncated since the Core sprouted, will finally in the fall of 1983, disappear entirely.

And the Core? As Wilcox says, "These reforms don't last forever. Rosovsky and the others won't be here to push it forever. Other deans with other priorities will come in, just as happened with Gen Ed." With a certain chagrin in his voice, he adds, "right now you can graduate without taking a single Gen Ed course." The more things change, the more things stay the same. Over at the Harvard Club, they still have that five foot shelf of books.

Introductory note: Full courses meet the basic General Education requirements in Natural Sciences, Social Sciences, and Humanities; half courses meet one half the requirements. All General Education courses may be used to meet the appropriate distribution requirement.

The Natural Sciences

Lower Group Courses--Primarily for Freshmen an

Natural Sciences 11. Mineral Resources and Science

Ulrich Petersen and Heinrich D. Holland

The role of mineral resources in modern society constraints imposed by availability on political well-being of nations and of mankind as a who reserves, technology, price, rates of production a impact, population growth, and per capita incon major metals, several minor metals, fuels, and these resources and their implications for the future.

Half course (spring term). M., W., F., at conference or laboratory section each week. (IV)