A Modest Proposal

The Committee on General Education goes before the Faculty this afternoon with a proposal which would remake the entire distribution setup of the College. After two and a half years of experimental operation, the GE program has been carefully sifted by the Committee; the proposals, cautions and flexible, would not only expand the successful courses offered in the program but also broaden the whole base of the concentration-distribution system to the point where it too will serve as general education in its own right.

To avoid too-narrow limits, students would be able to choose their courses from an approved list of nearly 30 offerings. The only really restrictive ruling would require that after the fall of 1951 three of the required six courses must come from the elementary GE list--which even now provides 11 choices in social sciences, humanities, and natural sciences. The remaining credits would be elected from either the upper-group GE list or a bumper crop of departmental courses. In every step of the actual framing, the Committee has been careful to allow leeway-- even to the inclusion of two "elastic clauses" to handle exceptional cases, individual or composite.

The plan is a model of restraint and care. Professor Wright's group has submitted a 'stepladder' program which would introduce the new rulings in a way that would allow smooth expansion of facilities and Faculty, and would not dislocate the College with a sudden changeover. And the proponents have no intention of urging on Harvard any such full program of compulsory courses as is now operative at Amherst or Chicago

Objections to the proposals, then, cannot logically come on the grounds of cramping a student's program; for the new system would not differ substantially form the old so far as the number of distribution courses is concerned. If there is objection, it must come on philosophical grounds from those members of the Faculty who still feel that GE is not healthy for Harvard

Harvard, which comes rather late than early to this problem, has benefitted by the mistakes of its colleagues: the Wright proposals, by allowing the widest latitude of time as well as choice, avoid the real danger evident in other colleges, which destroy all choice by stacking the required courses in the first two years and saving concentration for later.

Again, the critics may say that students can get all the benefits of GE under the present arrangement; but at least an element of compulsion is necessary to protect department teachers from having to compete with the broader aims of he Committee. To organize the system too far might produce, as is the case in other school, "a lesser breed without the law," a general education faculty looked on disdainfully by their colleagues of the departments. Today's proposal guarantees the continuance of high-level instruction obtained by staffing GE from regular Faculty rolls.

The Committee proposals are the result of nearly seven years of study and experiments; they offer the College a program far broader and more liberal than any other comparable system now in operation. There should be no hesitation on his matter either in the Faculty or among students.