UC To Present Student Opinion On Draft in January

With faculty debate on the curricular review officially underway, students on the Committee on Undergraduate Education (CUE) say that they plan to spend the next month gathering opinion on the review from their peers.

Undergraduates will be invited to attend dinner discussions with student members of the CUE, according to committee member Tracy E. Nowski ’07. Students will meet in small groups with the committee twice in December for a total of three hours to create “continuous conversations” between undergraduates and CUE members, Nowski said.

“You can barely scratch the surface of the report in 10 to 15 minutes,” she said.

A “few lines of consensus” will hopefully emerge within each group, Nowski said. In January, the groups will then each write a report that will be presented to the task force responsible for the general education proposal and its revisions, according to Nowski.

The Undergraduate Council (UC), which appoints the students who serve on the CUE, held a town hall meeting at the end of last month on the general-education report with task force co-chairs Bass Professor of English and American Literature and Language Louis Menand and Professor of Philosophy Alison Simmons.

The meeting gave council members and undergraduates the opportunity to share their views and ask questions of the co-chairs.

The preliminary report established the “idea that general education is meant to tie what we learn at Harvard to our lives after Harvard,” according to Matthew R. Greenfield ’08, the Student Affairs Committee (SAC) vice chair for Undergraduate Education and a CUE member.

Greenfield said that students and faculty will now have to address two questions: whether the report correctly identifies the goal of general education and whether the proposal is the appropriate way to get there.

The UC will attempt to find the answers to these questions in its December discussions with students, Greenfield said.

UC President John S. Haddock ’07 said that he was “really encouraged” by yesterday’s Faculty meeting. While Haddock did not know what specific actions the UC will take prior to the next full Faculty meeting on Dec. 12, he said that “there will certainly be a UC reaction by that time.”

Haddock said the UC’s position will be influenced by the CUE’s findings, the preliminary general-education report, and a letter issued by the task force after the report’s release, but he added the council will ultimately come to its own conclusions. “We won’t limit ourselves to being reactionary,” he said.

The UC also has a member of its own, SAC chair Ryan A. Petersen ’08, on the eight-member task force. Petersen was unavailable for comment last night.

—Staff writer Brittney L. Moraski can be reached at bmoraski@fas.harvard.edu.