DISPUTED "AREAS"

Near the end of a year replete with such academic controversies as teaching vs research, tutoring vs daily work, Walsh-Sweezy-Feild vs permanent tenure and appointments, it is fitting that the Student Council should blossom forth with a report on Education at Harvard. One cannot but feel, as long as there are already so many whited sepulchres elbowing one another in obvious scholastic and social discomfort in this friendly-or-feudal community, that maybe the Council has hit upon the whole root of the evil--for if Harvard is not essentially designed for education, three centuries of Faculty and students have been badly duped.

Due to its subject, the Council report has had to deal with a great variety of factors; and considering its subject, a seventy page report is a fairly concise analysis. There is, however, some excess material. The recommendations concerning concentration and distribution, the tutorial system general examinations, the teaching of courses, and the House Plan are largely reiterations of any comments on facts already known to students and Faculty. But on one question, the Council's bloodhounds have struck off on a more original scent. To enable Harvard to regain its illusory objective of a really "liberal" education, the report recommends the establishment of five introductory courses covering the major areas of knowledge--two each for the natural sciences and humanities and one for the social sciences. The salient point of such courses is that, following what seems to be the Hutchins philosophy of education, they would be deigned to cut across departmental boundaries. This procedure is generally stimulating to both teacher and pupil; and it is unquestionably an excellent medium for providing that really liberal education which the Council has concluded Harvard does not now instill in its students.

Any such innovation as this contains at least one bitter ingredient, and the Council's proposal that the five "area" courses be made compulsory in place of the present distribution requirements will be a strong dose for those students with definite occupational proclivities. The proposal will be criticized for forcing the postponement of specialization until the final two years, until after the broad "area" background has been nailed in place. This is flying in the face of Dean Hanford's policy of providing tutorial and a certain amount of specialization for some talented men as early as their first year of college. It calls for the reduction or abolition of freedom of electives--the ideal of Lowell and Conant--in the first two years of college. The Council committee feels, however, that this is bitter but necessary--the price of a truly liberal education. Its "area" courses are not to be superficial survey courses; they will aim to be penetrating, comprehensive courses, possessing all the thoroughness and vigor or History I, and backed up by essay-type examinations instead of the true-false exercises necessary in an overly broad "civilization" course.

Such recommendations are impressive. Something is indeed happening to education. The old system is not clicking so well. There are a dozen indications of Faculty, student, and graduate unrest, chiefly caused by the realization that college is no longer doing the job it once did, or might still do under changed conditions. If Harvard is to continue at, or even near, the top of the scholastic heap, it is time to take the cotton of complacency out of the administrative ear, and hearken to proposals such as the one made by the Council.