Pulling Back from Permissiveness

Harvard begins debate on fundamental curriculum reform

Outside, rain spattered the windows of University Hall, the highceilinged, portrait-lined administrative heart of Harvard. Inside, there was not a vacant chair in the hall's steamy conference room as some 200 members of the faculty of arts and sciences convened for a highly charged debate. The topic: a complete overhaul of the undergraduate general education curriculum, which for the past 30 years has served as a model for higher education.

At issue is Harvard's revered tradition of welcoming graduating seniors into "the company of educated men and women." The late Harvard president, James Bryant Conant, in a 1945 report entitled "General Education in a Free Society," maintained that an educated graduate must complete courses in three broad categories--the natural sciences, the social sciences and the humanities. But with the loosening of requirements, the growth of specialized courses and the permissiveness of the 1960s, the general education idea all but disappeared. Easy courses that could be used to satisfy the requirements, such as "History 1380: European Oceanic Discovery, Trade and Settlement, 1680-1815" (dubbed "Boats" by irreverent students), mushroomed. Says David Riesman. Harvard professor of social sciences: "There was a feeling on the part of the faculty that too much had been given away.

As part of a growing nationwide movement toward curriculum reform.

Dean Henry Rosovsky started in 1974 a major review of Harvard's undergraduate course of study. The result was a 36-page proposal for a "core curriculum" that is now being debated by the faculty. Scrapping the amorphous general education categories, the proposal outlines specific course requirements in five precisely defined core areas. As it stands now, the proposal would require each graduate, whatever his major, to have completed:

P: One course in literature, one in music or fine arts and one dealing with the "contexts of culture"--like a study of Medicean Florence or Neoclassicism--in a "literature and the arts" core area.

P: Two history courses, one contemporary and one on an older epoch like the French or Russian Revolution.

P: A social science course such as a psychology course on personality and one on moral or political philosophy.

P: One course in physical science or mathematics and another in biological or be havioral science

P: A course within a "foreign languages and cultures" category.

The proposal emphasizes that courses would be interdisciplinary, with an eye toward a "basic literacy in major forms of intellectual discourse" for all students. Students would be required to take an expository writing course and to demonstrate competence in a foreign language, as they are now: they would also have to take a math review course if they failed an exam at the beginning of the freshman year.

A number of schools, including the University of Chicago, already have some version of a core curriculum, while St. John's in Annapolis, Md., has developed its own "great books curriculum." Other colleges, notably Brown, are standing by their liberalized curriculums, in which students have few set academic requirements.

Champions of the core plan, including Harvard President Derek Bok, contend that students need more guidance in what they study. Says Government Professor Michael Walzer: "We can't function as a nutritionist who tells his patients that they are very intelligent and that there's a supermarket around the corner." Proponents also argue that even though the new requirements are more rigid than existing ones, they would still fill only a quarter of an undergraduate's schedule, the same as in the present system. That would leave the equivalent of two years for a major area of study and one year for electives.

Foes of the reform attack it as reactionary. Says Sociology Professor Orlando Patterson: "Arriving at some fixed notion of what constitutes an educated person--in this day and age. it just won't wash. It moves away from a view that learning to think for oneself is the key to a modern education."

Meanwhile the Harvard Crimson, one student newspaper, has counseled that "the core will not solve one of Harvard's fundamental problems, the dearth of close association between students and faculty members." arvard's scientists in particular are massed against the proposal, arguing that it slights technologically oriented science courses and will discourage the "better students" in those areas from applying to Harvard. But, counters one proponent of the system, "the kind of science student who'd turn this place down because of the core is the kind who'd end up at M.I.T. anyway."

[f passed, the plan would be phased in during the fall of 1979. But it would not be easy to put into effect. Many faculty members traditionally have preferred scholarship to teaching, and specialized graduate courses to basic undergraduate ones. "The real question," says Riesman, "is whether faculty members can be persuaded that they can teach these courses while keeping their peer respect." Furthermore, says Physics Professor Robert Pound, "The likelihood that these enormous courses will cause any excitement is fairly small."

Despite the problems, it is expected that some version of the core will pass at a faculty vote on April 11--especially since Rosovsky, who turned down the presidency of Yale partly to push the reform, has personally lobbied 150 to 200 of the 733 faculty members. Said one professor: "The dean has really hitched his wagon to this."

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