Interim Chief Seeks Curricular Relief

On Feb. 24, newly announced interim University President Derek C. Bok said that he will not impose his views on Harvard’s ongoing Curricular Review. However, in his latest work, “Our Underachieving Colleges,” he labors for 343 pages to spotlight his reforms for American universities.

Chronicling the failures of higher education, the book draws attention to the issues that reformers at Harvard will have to face in the coming months—and raises the question of whether Bok will be one of them.

The lengthy subtitle—“A Candid Look At How Much Students Learn And Why They Should Be Learning More”—provides a basic outline of Bok’s arguments. Employing recent educational studies and statistics, Bok seeks to quantify the unfulfilled promise of today’s colleges. He expresses his recommended changes in clear, unpretentious prose, but he insists on their urgency.

None of the book’s suggestions are groundbreakingly new. Nothing Bok says is truly exciting, but installing his improvements would strengthen the educational practices colleges currently have in place. His concern is not what changes to make, but how changes should be made.

Like the more polemic educational critics who he dismisses as off-base, Bok points to a troubling complacency of undergraduate institutions.

However, Bok argues that the sluggishness of colleges’ progress is a problem of method, not of intention. Faculty are not apathetic or lazy, he writes, only ignorant of research identifying active teaching methods as superior to the old-fashioned lecture. He writes that “faculties seem inclined to use research and experimentation to understand and improve every institution, process and human activity except their own.”

To reform, Bok instructs educators to apply the same principles of analysis that they use in their scholarly work to their teaching methods.

He also urges faculty to be proactive in implementing these reforms because “while [college] leaders have considerable leverage and influence of their own, they are often reluctant to employ these assets for fear of arousing opposition from the faculty that could attract unfavorable publicity, worry potential donors, and even threaten their jobs.”

Later in the book, Bok criticizes the structuring of many curricular reviews. He rejects the easy idealism of many curricular reviews and instead advocates practical, common-sense improvements to the basic structures of undergraduate education.

Bok warns that “reviews of undergraduate education frequently proceed in a haze of unwarranted optimism without a thorough discussion of ends and means.” Only when colleges have a firm grasp of their own functioning and abilities will curricular reviews actually bring the recommended changes to fruition.

Bok describes at length the failure of requirements which are not supported by adequate faculty and administrative support. Introductory writing classes taught by relatively inexperienced graduate students and visiting professors, rather than tenured faculty, are singled out as examples. Bok also highlights the kind of language requirements that fail to produce fluency but represent an undue course burden.

Another chief concern is the development of moral reasoning and character. Bok spends considerable time describing the role of university leaders in shaping an ethical community. Everyone—from presidents to dormitory proctors—contributes to setting a moral standard. If moral development is not to be “merely an option for students who are interested...and for college authorities when it is not too costly,” universities must actively seek to promote more ethical thinking in daily life and at every level.

While he concedes that it may no longer be possible for colleges to teach morality, he argues that colleges should provide, through coursework, the skills necessary to arrive at an adequate personal morality.

Bok refrains from offering specific recommendations about coursework, but he repeatedly questions the efficacy of curricula that will not be remembered or applied later in life.

He presents sobering statistics about student retention rates and urges faculty to consider carefully why specific requirements exist aside from their historic presence or idealized purposes. Should an introductory chemistry class, for example, take the place of coursework that teaches the essentials of basic American citizenship? His point for universities is that simple knowledge of a subject area is not the same as imparting knowledge of it.

Bok is well-aware of the difficulty of qualitatively evaluating academic progress. Nonetheless, he presents specific directives—such as revising faculty tenure procedures to include evaluations of teaching ability—to rouse the sleeping giants of American undergraduate education from their collective slumber.

The answer, he writes, is in a greater creativity of approach and a greater clarity of vision. The faculty must turn ideas into action, and a university president must strive to “persuade,” “encourage,” and, ultimately, “point the way.”

Whether Bok can implement his own suggestions at Harvard is yet to be seen. It is one thing to put ideas in a book—but quite another to put those ideas into action in the unwieldy environment of the modern university.

—Staff writer Allison A. Frost can be reached at afrost@fas.harvard.edu.

Our Underachieving Colleges
By Derek Bok
Princeton University Press
Out Now