Dysfunctional Gen Ed

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. But if it is broke, don’t just rearrange the useless debris and then tell us it’s fixed.

The College has flagrantly violated this second dictum with its recent revisions to the General Education requirements. Everyone knew that the previous system was flawed because there seemed to be no reason why certain classes counted and other classes did not. One expected, therefore, that the new system would increase the ways in which to satisfy the requirements.

A superficial attempt at this goal was made in the new Distribution Requirements, which do allow, for example, students who have taken one Aesthetics and Culture class to fulfill the required second with any class categorized as Arts and Humanities. This appears to be an improvement on the previous rule, which required that classes be explicitly marked as Gen Eds, but all it has really done is confuse people.

Several classes that counted as Gen Eds in the previous schema have been stripped of their designation, and the main problem of obviously suitable courses’ failing to count has in no way been solved.

All this seems to be the result of equivocation about the goals of the Gen Ed program. It is certainly not attempting to be a unifying curriculum like Columbia’s Core, in which everyone takes the same set of classes. Not even Expository Writing, required of the freshmen, does that, for every section is focused on a different subject. On the other hand, the Gen Ed program is not trying to force students to have a deep taste of many disciplines, or else it wouldn’t let people away with taking Societies of the World 38: “Pyramid Schemes: The Archaeological History of Ancient Egypt.”

The report published in 2015 by the General Education Review Committee accused the old program of precisely this confusion, namely attempting to be at once a distribution system and a general education system. One of the options the committee proposed as a remedy was the “mixed model,” synthesizing (rather than confounding) both systems by pairing the compatible Gen Ed categories (such as Science of Living Systems and Science of the Physical Universe) and requiring one class in each pair to be specifically designed for general education, while the other would be a departmental class in an appropriate field.

I myself think the pure gen-ed system of Columbia or the University of Chicago is the correct way of creating the well-rounded citizen, but the committee’s proposal was reasonable and defensible. Nevertheless it rests entirely on the expectation that the Gen Ed courses will be designed afresh to be truly general, like Humanities 10a: “A Humanities Colloquium,” rather than unnervingly particular, like Aesthetics and Interpretation 63: “East Asian Cinema.” The crux of the affair is the elimination of most of the courses marked primarily as Gen Ed and their replacement with a few classes that deal broadly yet rigorously with “the big questions.” Otherwise this whole endeavor will have been merely polishing the doorknobs in a hoarder’s house.

Look, for instance, at a class such as Physics 101: “Foundations of Theoretical Physics.” This is an extremely clever course designed to bridge the yawning chasm between Astronomy 2: “Celestial Navigation,” which no self-respecting person would even confess to have taken, and Physics 15a: “Introductory Mechanics and Relativity,” which requires much more time in section than most English concentrators are prepared to tolerate. Physics 101, however, was ingeniously designed so as to treat serious, legitimate subject matter across the gamut of theoretical physics without drowning the interested humanities students.

Designing Gen Eds for the natural sciences is difficult, of course, for the average physics concentrator is probably better able to read Shakespeare than the average history concentrator is to do wave equations, and it is far easier to conceive of a broad yet unified and rigorous introduction to literature than to science. Physics 101 nonetheless achieves its goal admirably and should be a model for a science Gen Ed, but under the current system it counts for nothing.

Meanwhile, there are persons at the College who have taken extremely advanced physics classes but have not completed their SPU requirement.

How to explain this? One might suggest that the advanced physics student has taken classes that are too particular, so they oughtn’t count for Gen Ed. Fine, but Physics 101 is plenty general. One certainly hopes that the awkward transitional winter in which we are now discontented will yield to an at least passable summer of curricular coherence, but for that to happen in — real seasons now — Fall 2019 would require that squirreled away in every department office a team of experts were furiously designing truly general courses to be implemented next academic year. Something tells me this is not happening, so next semester we shall likely be back swearing loudly at our my.Harvard profiles just the same as we heretofore have been.

Liam M. Warner ’20, a Crimson Editorial editor, is a Classics concentrator in Adams House. His column appears on alternate Tuesdays.