Given Uncertain Mandate, Gen Ed Takes Shape

When the 13-person General Education Standing Committee began deliberating last fall, they had a huge task on their hands: giving shape and meaning to an amorphous mandate that would guide the education of undergraduates for a generation.

“You come in with a quite frankly muddled piece of legislation,” said Gen Ed committee member Alexander “Zander” N. Li ’08, referring to the Final Report of the Task Force on General Education. “At the end of the day, the categories are very hard to take as these structures that stand alone.”

The committee, led by Jewish studies professor Jay M. Harris, devoted the fall term to defining what kinds of classes would belong in each of the eight categories, according to committee member Alexander N. Chase-Levenson ’08.

“It has a slightly random look to it as a whole,” veteran classics professor Richard F. Thomas said of the new curriculum.

On why the Gen Ed plan was finally approved, he said, “I think it was a general weariness.”

Moving past that weariness, professors must now confront whether their desire for a new program has led to discarding the virtues of the old one.

LACKING A CORE

Despite purported differences in philosophy, many of Gen Ed’s categories resemble those of the Core: Ethical Reasoning looks like Moral Reasoning, and Empirical and Mathematical Reasoning looks like Quantitative Reasoning.

“You can’t invent a whole new universe,” English professor Louis Menand, one of the authors of the final report, said recently.

But even so, there are some key differences between the old and the new.

According to Harris, science classes will deal more with contemporary issues such as stem cell research, genomics, and climate change.

Since a number of Harvard students will be making decisions impacting climate change and other current concerns, Harris said, it is important for Gen Ed to “train intelligent laypeople” who would understand the basics of such matters.

One category would not have been conceived 60 years ago, said former Dean of the Faculty William C. Kirby: Culture and Belief.

“In this one, you do see a larger role for the study of faith and religion,” the Chinese history professor said.

According to some professors, that attention to religion, calling to mind world events since Sept. 11, is part of a program that is too focused on the present day.

“Global cooling was the big threat in the 1960s,” medieval history professor Michael McCormick said recently, highlighting the dangers of structuring a curriculum around current concerns.

The focus on contemporary issues seems to some professors a rejection of the study of knowledge for knowledge’s sake.

“I think Harvard University should be the last place on earth where we abandon the thought where some topics taught are studied for their own sake,” said Chemistry and Physics professor Eric J. Heller. “We are not a vocational school.”

This move may leave some historians who would like to teach classes that do not directly cite current day trends out in the cold.

“Time is removed from the categories themselves,” McCormick said. “We live in time. That is not reflected in the general structure of the new curriculum as I see it.”

But Menand said he sees plenty of space for the study of the past in the new program.

“There are many categories in which a history professor can teach,” he said. “It seems to me to be a non-problem.”

History department chair James T. Kloppenberg agreed, telling The Crimson recently that he believed his colleagues would eventually teach classes in five of the eight categories.

To battle the fears of McCormick and others, professors passed a measure last spring, requiring students to take at least one class engaged with the past. Harris said he finds this rule unnecessary.

“If there’s someone who’s going to work that hard to avoid a course that provides a significant engagement with the past,” Harris said, “I say, ‘Let them!’”

But by the same token, social science concentrators can avoid literature by taking “Elements of Rhetoric” for Aesthetic and Interpretive Understanding, and humanities concentrators can avoid hard science by taking “Understanding Darwinism” for Science of Living Systems.

A similar gap in the curriculum has put pressure on economists, who continue to search for an appropriate place for their flagship course, Social Analysis 10: “Principles of Economics.”

With no future equivalent to Social Analysis, the department proposed placing Ec10 in the United States in the World category but has so far been turned down by Harris’ committee.

CHANGE FOR ITS OWN SAKE

Some professors say that the College needed to overhaul its curriculum because students were frustrated: both with limited choices and a proliferation of seemingly irrelevant Core classes.

But even though Gen Ed will allow for a greater variety of courses—including classes without final exams—it actually requires students to take eight courses as opposed to seven in the Core, limiting elective options further.

For many professors, this sacrifice of freedom of study appears worthwhile as long as it is accompanied by the destruction of the Core. Most seem to agree that after 30 years, it was time for that program to go.

“The Core will die. The Core is a dead core. This core is no more. It has shuffled off its mortal coil,” English professor W. James Simpson said, imitating a Monty Python sketch.

That death, professors said, is a timely one.

“Harvard’s a very traditional university. There are many things I like about those traditions,” History of Science professor Peter L. Galison said. “But the curriculum is not a place where it’s a good or appropriate thing to simply invoke tradition.”

“This is something that belongs to us,” he said of Gen Ed, “and it wasn’t something that was handed down as a piece of tradition.”

But who “us” refers to is another question. Menand correctly called the 168-14-11 vote for Gen Ed a “landslide”—but the 193 who participated in that vote constitute little more than a fourth of the full Faculty.

ALL IN THE IMPLEMENTATION

Gen Ed’s supporters and critics agree that implementation of the new curriculum will be more crucial than the charge given by last year’s final report.

Many are hoping that even if it accomplishes nothing else, Gen Ed will encourage more inspired teaching.

“A curriculum does not exist in the abstract,” Kirby said. “This will succeed or fail according to the quality of courses and teaching and learning.”

Implementing Gen Ed “wisely” might make up for shortcomings in its design, Thomas said.

Some classes promise to remain small. Menand will co-teach a literature class—Humanities 10—in Aesthetic and Interpretive Understanding with English professor Stephen J. Greenblatt that will be capped at 40 students.

Much of the new program’s success will depend on whether the committee is able to “hold their nerve” and reject proposals that do not fit the criteria, Simpson said. In doing so, it will preserve the desired differences between Gen Ed and the Core.

This year, 45 courses were approved out of approximately 60 proposals, according to Harris. By 2010, the program should triple in size, offering at least eight classes per semester in each category.

The early proposals have come, for the most part, from the most engaged professors—accounting for less than 10 percent of the Faculty.

The Gen Ed committee does not reject proposals. Instead, they send proposals back to professors with recommendations so that professors can resubmit their edited proposals for further review.

“We don’t say no for the sake of saying no,” Harris said. “It’s a ‘not yet.’”

—Staff writer Bonnie J. Kavoussi can be reached at kavoussi@fas.harvard.edu.