Dean Ford Foresees Some Alterations In Doty Report's Proposals on Gen Ed

Dean Ford predicted last night that the Faculty of Arts and Sciences would change some of the Doty Report's recommendations, but he did not specify which ones.

Ford praised the work of the Doty Committee, which was created to review the College's General Education program. He said, however, that some differences of opinion over the Committee's proposals were to be expected since "there were ten Faculty members on the Doty Committee and about 600 can attend Faculty meetings."

Two Main Proposals

Addressing the Radcliffe Alumnae Council in the Carpenter Center lecture room, Ford described "several currently hot educational problems in this University." He devoted most of his speech to the Gen Ed program, under which Harvard and Radcliffe undergraduates must take one course in the Humanities, one in the Social Sciences, and one in the Natural Sciences during their first two years.

The Doty Report's two main proposals were that the Committee on General Education be given more power to requisition teaching personnel and that courses be divided into only two fields, Sciences and Humanities. Filed this Fall, the report has been discussed at the last two meetings of the Faculty.

Ford said he was "pretty sure" that the Faculty would want to modify some features of the Gen Ed program, "although I wouldn't want to predict which."

He told the alumnae that he was "quite convinced of the importance of a strong interdepartmental component" in courses offered to undergraduates. Courses cutting across departmental lines act as "a kind of invitation to Faculty members to pose questions they know a lot about in a context slightly different from their usual ones," he said.

Ford came out against a proposal, made at the Faculty meeting, to eliminate all requirements from the Gen Ed program and allow undergraduates to choose Gen Ed courses as freely as other courses.

"If there were no requirement," Ford said, "many of the great Gen Ed courses now given might not be replaced and we would be left with a fringe of courses given by people who are not very happy with their departments."

"The most difficult issue" raised by the Doty Report, Ford said, is whether the present tripartite division of General Education should be dropped for the bipartite division. Although he did not express a direct opinion on the proposal, Ford noted that a realignment of the Gen Ed program would "force fields that haven't decided what they are to make up their minds."