Rigor Under Fire

When this transitional year began, the interim leaders of our university worked hard to emphasize that it would be anything but transitory in its importance. At a Nov. 6 dinner with leading alumni, Provost Steven E. Hyman singled out three movements that were reshaping the world of academia, with our university at its center. Echoing former President Lawrence H. Summers, he broadly stressed Harvard’s ongoing process of internationalization and technological development.

But the third movement he suggested was more contested. Hyman spoke of how the German model of a liberal education—independent departments working independently—was irremediably outdated today. Many significant areas of knowledge were simply not being conveyed to students because departments would not extend themselves beyond conventional boundaries.

For example, researchers of the phenomenon of genocide will never really be able to understand what happened in Rwanda unless they analyze sociology and psychology along with history and political science. Likewise, the Harvard Stem Cell Institute brings together lawyers and public policy experts with geneticists and biologists. The benefits of interdisciplinary research have all been widely noted, but Hyman—and the Task Force on General Education—took it a step further when they emphasized interdisciplinary teaching in undergraduate liberal education.

On Tuesday, however, this forward-thinking model was endangered. The first regular Faculty meeting to discuss the October general education report was contentious and left no clear decision in sight. Some professors opposed the content-based approach of the report, wishing rather for a methodological emphasis that would introduce students to the tools of various disciplines. Beren Professor of Economics N. Gregory Mankiw, for one, was in this camp. He raised the possibility, as reported in yesterday’s Crimson, of distribution requirements rather than a unified, interdisciplinary approach.

Thankfully, others advocated otherwise, defending the hard-fought conclusions of the Task Force on General Education. Buttenwieser University Professor Stanley Hoffmann replied: “George Bernard Shaw once said, ‘People who are merely specialists are basically idiots.’” The promulgation of knowledge, Hoffmann seemed to say, must extend beyond mere methodology if it is to help students to accomodate the real challenges they will face beyond college. Most of us are not in the running to become scholars content in understanding one specialized area of the world, as Mankiw’s ideas seem to suggest. Rather, most of us wish to grapple with the big issues in an integrated manner.

As he congratulated the writers of the report, Hoffmann himself provided a pull-quote: “I want to haggle. We will haggle. We always haggle. But I think they [the Task Force] had it right.” I happen to think so, too. The future of this curriculum will lie in its integration to real life and not its disconnection from it.



Pierpaolo Barbieri ’09, a Crimson editorial editor, is a history concentrator in Eliot House.