Gateways to General Education

Next fall, Stephen Greenblatt and Louis Menand will team up to offer an introductory humanities colloquium that will be listed in next year’s catalog along with over a dozen new divisional courses in the humanities. Students will also have the opportunity to travel along the “Silk Road” with Mark Elliott from East Asian Languages and Civilizations and with Richard Wolf from the Music Department as their guides. Michael Puett of East Asian Languages and Civilizations and Roberto Mangabeira Unger from the Law School will reflect on the contrast between two attitudes—staying out of trouble and looking for trouble—in the East and West. Sean Kelley from the Philosophy Department will offer “Existentialism in Literature and Film.” And Thomas Lewis in Religion will address questions about the nature of human freedom, personal history, and memory in his course “On Being Human.” In 2007-2008, students will be able to move along “Global Pathways” with Homi Bhabha, study “Literature and Human Suffering” with James Engell ’73, and explore “Arts and Minds” with Julie Buckler and Marjorie Garber.

Last fall, The Crimson published a column by Travis R. Kavulla ’06-’07 entitled “A Small Niche for Great Books: An Armenian Studies Professor’s Lonely Accomplishment in General Education.” What troubled me most about his title was the word “lonely.” Could it be possible, I wondered, that, at a time of deep commitment to reforming general education and reinvigorating the undergraduate curriculum, there was only one faculty member in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) offering what Kavulla described as the “semblance of well-rounded, broad education to eager newcomers?”

A voice inside rapidly began rehearsing a litany of soul-searching Carrie Bradshaw-like questions about the intended and unintended consequences of our collective curricular efforts. Is it true, as President Lowell once famously declared, that Harvard freshmen “bring a little knowledge in and the seniors take none out, so it accumulates through the years”? Do we, as faculty, perceive the “spark of creativity” in the students who arrive here, then proceed to “water” it, as he is reputed to have declared at Commencement? Is education the discovery of our own ignorance (Will Durant), the art of living an ethical life (Hegel), the ability to listen to almost anything without losing our tempers (Robert Frost), life itself (John Dewey), our best chance at happiness (Mark Van Doren), or the opening of doors (Ralph Waldo Emerson)?

Emerson, to my mind, got it right. And when I read the January report on “Curricular Renewal in Harvard College,” I was reassured that we were also getting it right. After all, the report called for the creation of new courses in general education that would be “expansive in scope and integrative in approach.” The portal experience, it was emphasized, should be designed to “situate important texts, concepts, and discoveries in the context of larger problems and themes in ways that provide students with an intellectual introduction to broad areas of knowledge and inquiry.” And as I looked at our traditional humanities offerings, with courses that include “The American Novel,” “The History of Modern Moral Philosophy,” “World Religions: Diversity and Dialogue,” “Asian Modernities,” “Opera,” and “Survey of World Art,” I realized we already have much in place that opens doors for our students.

The challenge, of course, is still to translate ambitious programmatic statements like the one enunciated in the report of the Committee on General Education into multiple, concrete pedagogical practices. Once the principles are in place, what incentives do you provide to stimulate the creation of new courses, and how do you ensure that those new courses comply with both the letter and the spirit of the new curricular aspirations?

William Arrowsmith once lamented that precious few rewards exist at research universities for good teaching. “Universities are as uncongenial to teaching as the Mojave Desert to a clutch of Druid priests. If you want to restore a Druid priesthood, you cannot do it by offering prizes for Druid-of-the-Year. If you want Druids, you must grow forests.” We all know that it takes decades to grow a forest, and no institution can afford to wait decades to create an environment in which great courses will spontaneously emerge and good teaching will thrive.

Happily, FAS has been creating, step by step, an environment more congenial for its Druids. To be sure, we have the teaching awards (and they will, happily, remain in place), but we also now inhabit a culture that sends an important message to new tenure-track faculty by providing them with the opportunity to participate in a weeklong teacher training workshop. Committee on Undergraduate Education (CUE) course evaluations and reports on teaching now play a major role in reviews for promotion and tenure. Resources are allocated in part on the basis of departmental contributions to undergraduate education.

When faculty in the humanities began to engage with the principles mapped out by the General Education Committee, they inflected their concrete course proposals with many of the productive tensions that inevitably arise between theory and practice, but with remarkably little resistance to the mandate for courses that are “expansive in scope and integrative in approach.”

We may not yet have certainty when it comes to the Harvard College Curricular Review, but it is clear that there is lively consensus about the need for courses with interdisciplinary breadth and disciplinary depth, and humanities faculty are eager to teach them.

In his column, Kavulla proposed a “well-articulated, top-down initiative,” but it now appears clear that a second strategy for ensuring that Professor Russell does not feel lonely is to work from the bottom up, trusting that our faculty will know what students want and empowering them to develop courses that will appeal to our “eager newcomers,” who will remain captivated, absorbed, and enthralled so long as we continue to open doors for them.

Maria Tatar is Loeb Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures and Dean for the Humanities in FAS.