The Dilemma of Gen Ed

At the highest plateau of platitude, few will disagree with the goals of General Education. In a college which views a liberal arts education as two-pronged, general and departmental, it is clearly the role of the college to provide students with an antidote for the pressures of specialization and premature professionalism, to offer an education of breadth rather than depth (as in the departments).

But however broad the consensus on this basic ideal, the actual program at Harvard has come under increasing fire since its adoption. And it was to meet these attacks and refurbish and redefine the program that the Doy Committee was appointed in 1962, thirteen years after the passage of the first program for General Education at Harvard.

Theortically, the means for gaining the education-in-breadth goal of Gen Ed range from "totalitarianism," a core system in which every Harvard student takes exactly the same basic courses, to complete laissezfaire, whereby a student is required only to take some courses outside his own field of concentration. In 1945, the famous "Redbook," General Education in a Free Society, embraced a close approximation to the former plan, defining the word general as both "shared"--students taking the same lower-level courses with little choice in fulfilling upper-level requirements--and "philosophical," denoting the historic themes of Western Civilization.

But the specific Redbook proposals never got off the ground. When a final program for General Education was approved in 1949, three main changes had been made. Students were allowed to choose from a variety of lower-level courses; were given almost complete freedom of choice in fulfilling the upper-level requirements; and were allowed to substitute departmental courses for certain Gen Ed offerings. In short, the idea of Gen Ed as a "shared" experience was altered from the beginning.

In the ensuing years, other changes undermined the "philosophical" conception of Gen Ed as the means of transmitting the Western tradition. First, the Bruner committee to study the problem of science in Gen Ed recommended that the emphasis on the history of science be abandoned and asked that students be given instead a "knowledge of the fundamental principles of a special science" and an "idea of the methods of science as they are known today." Second, students who gained advanced placement were exempted from two out of three elementary Gen Ed courses. And, third, the conception of Freshman Seminars ran counter to Gen Ed by their intensive study of relatively limited topics.

These administrative changes only reflected more significant forces working against the idea of General Education. In the past twenty years there has been an explosion of knowledge with a corresponding trend towards specialized, highly technical research. As a result, students have felt the urge to plunge immediately into intensive study or--even worse for Gen Ed--have begun, along with many faculty members, to scorn the material taught in these required courses as superficial, in fact, misleading. And the pressure to advanced research has kept many professors from giving time to so basic a venture as Gen Ed.

There can be little doubt that the program has been bent by these winds of change. Most importantly, the distinction between Gen Ed and departmental courses has been blurred. In the Natural Sciences, where Nat Sci 5, 9, and 10 serve as basic departmental courses, it has been obliterated. Not only is the content of Gen Ed no longer shared, but it is something of a hodgepodge--at once methodological and historical, quantitative and qualitative in emphasis.

In the words of the Doty Committee, "a program that originated with a strong sense of urgency and direction has become increasingly difficult to defend or even understand." A program that began as a unified, recognizable whole has lost much of its coherence because of the exigencies of the Harvard experience.

The dilemma that faced the Doty Committee was whether it could recast General Education in a form both strong and comprehensible, whether it could give unity and meaning to the program without making Gen Ed static and rigid, whether it could retain or even add a broad range of offerings without being lost in a welter of contradictory goals.

(In the next few weeks a series of editorials will evaluate the Doty Report on General Education.)