The Best of Henry Rosovsky?

"A LETTER TO the Faculty on Undergraduate Education" isn't likely to make anyone throw away his copy of The Idea of a University. On the other hand, Dean Rosovsky's little booklet--you can pick up a copy at Nine University Hall, even if you belong not to the Faculty but to the "undergraduate population" Rosovsky wants to educate--suggests that at least some administrators are considering what Harvard's supposed to do and whether it's doing it. Rosovsky's statement last February about rethinking the "consensus" that's dominated education for 20 years was evidently seriously intended, and he's evidently genuinely interested in what the new letter calls "an effort to identify the major concerns to which we must address ourselves."

On the other hand, even a cursory glance through the 22-page booklet suggests that some aspects of Rosovsky's "broad review" of undergraduate education could stand some broadening. Take the section on grades, for example. Grades may not be the most vitally important subject treated in Rosovsky's letter, but he treats them at some length, and makes "student pressure" for their "significant relaxation" stand for a "growing sense" that all curricular constraints are arbitrary. Rosovsky acknowledges that grading practices vary by department, and then forges boldly ahead:

Do these discrepancies, as some critics charge, reflect a degree of arbitrariness in the system of evaluation that inevitably diminishes its legitimacy? Do these inconsistencies encourage students to act out of primitive self-interest, and to compete for the symbols rather than the substance of distinction?

It's difficult to see how even the most consistent grading system could provide the substance rather than the symbols of distinction. If anything, it seems as though primitive self-interest would strike a smoother path through a uniform grading system than among slings and arrows shot at random by indifferent professors. And it would seem that a discussion determined to raise basic questions should ask not just whether an evaluation system's legitimacy is diminishing, but also what made it legitimate to begin with.

Or take the section on Harvard's admissions policy. Harvard "has long sought to gather a student body of diverse talents," Rosovsky begins.

Yet it is said that the culture of the College does not equally support different kinds of achievement. Critics have charged, for example, that there is a persistent bias against the creative and performing arts, and a diminishing appreciation of excellence in extracurricular activities. If this is true, what is its source? And what can be done about it?

Those are interesting enough questions, in their way. On the other hand, there are questions about inequalities in the admissions policy that are more interesting, more significant, and a whole lot easier to answer. For example, there is a persistent and officially instituted bias against women in the admissions process, and there's no problem figuring what can be done about it: if it wants to, Harvard can admit as many women as men.

But after one passing allusion to this possibility, Rosovsky's broad review of undergraduate education drops all discussion of Harvard's sexual ratio, and encourages professors interested in it to go on to "other measures of heterogeneity as well." There's another group--the Strauch Committee--explicitly mandated to deal with Harvard-Radcliffe relations. So they're outside the province of the "Letter to the Faculty on Undergraduate Education." Somewhat like the legitimacy of grades, they're a political issue, not an educational one.

A DISTINCTION between educational and political issues is central to Rosovsky's letter. He contrasts his measured approach to educational reform to the "hurried and piecemeal...external pressure" (mostly from students) during the "turbulent decade" now ending, when "social and political issues frequently dominated academic discourse."

It's unlikely that Rosovsky's letter will evoke any hurried and piecemeal student "external pressure." In accordance with its downplaying of a political approach to reform, the letter's addressed primarily to the Faculty, who, Rosovsky explains, will have to implement any kind of reform, and who he presumably thinks have received what the undergraduates haven't: a "fair share of the recent intellectual additions to our resources."

Relying on just the Faculty and restricting discussion to academic issues seem inconsistent with Rosovsky's most obvious stab at suggesting what Harvard College should be--quoting McGeorge Bundy, former dean of the Faculty. Education "suggests what someone does to a student," Bundy said, while learning "suggests what professors and students do with knowledge, with thought, and with one another." Learning sounds more attractive; Rosovsky's approach, at least in this letter, sounds more like education. His fears of turbulence work against his concern for excitement. Suspended between images of students passively accepting what's done to them and students acting, back in the turbulent decade, the letter attempts to rethink basic assumptions without calling them into question. It threatens to become a well-meaning but not overly incisive Everything We Always Wanted to Know About Learning--But Are Afraid to Ask.

Raising issues this way naturally makes them harder to discuss. Rosovsky finishes up with seven "substantial questions," including, what are the central goals of undergraduate education?

How do you set about answering that question? In isolation--the only way Rosovsky poses it--about all you can say is that since no two undergraduates are exactly alike, the central goals of every undergraduate's education are at least a little different from every other's. Whatever else you might say presupposes a community, setting norms and standards and general ideals, not just isolated undergraduates. A glance at the questions Rosovsky raises in his section on educational goals make this point clear:

For example, what skills are now considered to be "basic" and what should be the measure of their satisfactory acquisition?...What are the moral values and standards of conduct to which this community is committed, and how are they best articulated and taught?

Implicit in any meaningful question about the central goals of undergraduate education are other, much less abstract questions putting Harvard in a context. What role do Harvard and the people it educates play in the society around it? What is that society like? How and how much can or should Harvard's ideas of basic skills and moral values differ from those of the society?

Different answers to questions like these would lead to different ideas about Harvard's undergraduate curriculum. For example, some people might think that Harvard should train members of society's ruling class--business executives, corporation lawyers, and United States senators, say--but work to integrate it racially and sexually. These people might want the College to admit more women and more minority students and place heavy stress on pre-professional courses. They might want to encourage reformed versions of things like final clubs, where future leaders could develop a sense of solidarity with one another.

OTHER OBSERVERS might consider Harvard's grading system in a broader context than the "Letter to the Faculty" does. They might conclude that all grading systems encourage students to work for rewards handed down by people above them, much as they will later do for wages. People who wanted to replace a wage-labor system with something else--with a society where people worked for the joy of working, say--might decide that one small step towards their goal would be the complete abolition of grades.

Of course, these people would no longer be limiting themselves to strictly academic considerations. They'd be letting social and political issues dominate academic discourse, just as students did during Rosovsky's turbulent decade, when they decided Harvard should help them understand black people's history and shouldn't train officers to fight Vietnamese peasants.

But though Rosovsky's distinction between educational and political issues leads him to try to pull educational ideas from the sky--he casually suggests, for example, that "alternative usages of units of time" might include making expository writing "the focus of all studies in the freshman year"--it doesn't take Harvard out of politics. It just takes Harvard's present functions in society and the educational ideas that make them possible for granted. It calls on Harvard freely to choose a future, but it refuses to recognize the necessity--the political reality--to which any choice would respond.