Reform the Program in General Education

As former Harvard President Abbott Lawrence Lowell, Class of 1877, once said, “A well-educated man must know a little bit of everything and one thing well.” During his tenure as president, Lowell backed his words by restructuring undergraduate education, instituting concentrations and a distribution requirement. But today, the College’s Program in General Education—the modern successor of the original distribution requirements—fails to match the vision set forth by Lowell.

A recent report on the General Education program found it to be “failing” to achieve its initial goals and “occupies no place in the College’s identity,” according to information about the report published in The Crimson. For a program that takes up eight of a Harvard student’s roughly 32 classes, the conclusions the report offers are deeply disturbing. Unfortunately, we hardly find these results surprising.

First and foremost, there is a problem of bureaucracy: In order for a class to count towards one of the eight requirements, faculty members must go through a rigorous process to get their class approved. This process creates inherent inconsistencies in the program; some classes that should count for a given requirement often do not simply because faculty members failed to apply or had applications denied.

Faculty members also cite concerns about Gen Ed courses being more difficult to teach than other classes. This is partly due to a discrepancy in class sizes, as the average enrollment of a Gen Ed class is between 50 and 99 students, compared with 10 to 19 for non-Gen Ed classes. Instead of effectively teaching students about a wide variety of topics, the program causes unnecessary stress for all parties involved.

The more alarming flaw in the Gen Ed program is the lack of a coherent purpose. In its current form, the program attempts to be two things but fails to do either well. According to the report, the program combines a general education philosophy with a distribution requirement structure. Professor Sean D. Kelly, director of the committee that created the report, told The Crimson that “in general the program is nowhere near the best version of what it aims to be.”

A simple distribution requirement would be a much better way of meeting the goal of students knowing a decent amount about many things. This would produce students who are both well-rounded and well-educated by giving students the opportunity to more effectively learn about a wide variety of topics in a system with less rigid requirements.

Unfortunately, with the glacial pace of change at Harvard, we are afraid that any sort of meaningful improvement in the program will not come for years. We hope that any alterations to the Gen Ed program occur as soon as possible in order to maintain the vibrancy and ideals of Harvard’s undergraduate curriculum.

Harvard places a focus on a liberal arts education. The goal is a noble one, but it is clear that the current General Education program has been unsuccessful in achieving its aims. Distribution requirements would more effectively accomplish this goal with greater efficiency and less bureaucracy. It is time to return to a system where Harvard students can truly learn a little bit of everything.