'Cliffe Conference Explores Gen Ed

"There's a good chance that the Doty Committee may talk forever about General Education," Edward T. Wilcox, director of advanced placement and freshman seminars, told the RGA's Cedar Hill Conference yesterday.

In a swift three hours, the Radcliffe conference attempted to explore the gamut of problems presented by the content and approach of the University's General Education program. The meeting, sponsored semi-annually by the Radcliffe Government Association, could not plunge as deeply into the problem as the one-and-a-half year old Doty Committee, but they made some soundings.

The Gen Ed program was devised at the end of the war on the theory that "free men should be acquainted with the basic theme of their culture," Wilcox explained in introduction. Since then, the pressure of specialization has enlarged the program from six specific courses "carved out of the curriculum," to 16 lower level alternatives, several of which may even be counted for concentration, he said.

Gen Ed courses should not be taken in the student's field, but conversely, as an introduction to unfamiliar areas, Susan J. First '64, a member of the student panel, commented. Many students are told, however, that a particular course is a prerequisite for their prospective concentrations, Sybil A. Shepard '63 pointed out.

The panel of five agreed with Donald R. Brown, Assistant Professor of Government and Social Studies, that one of the major problems is the professor who rejects an elementary presentation and ends up "soliloquizing with himself" in a highly sophisticated course.

One way to avoid specialization, a Harvard member of the audience suggested, would be to expose students to a professor's methodology rather than to emphasize his wealth of specialized factual knowledge. It might be more helpful "to force a student how to think, than what to think about," David M. Gordon '64 said.

Another solution would be to make Gen Ed courses more interdisciplinary, suggested Gail McGreevy '65. The University might offer a lower level humanities course, for example, which covered the history, music, art, and philosophy of one particular era, she said.

In a similar vein, Mary E. Procter '64 proposed that students be exposed to progressive stages of thought about a certain historical period. She suggested that "prohibiting the professor from using his own specialized vocabulary" would attract students who use Gen Ed for purposes of exploration