It Adds Up to Calculus

Before the lights went out at its meeting three weeks ago, the Faculty had voted approval of nearly all of the new General Education program proposed earlier in the fall by the Committee on Educational Policy. Tomorrow's meeting will dispose of the one last detail.

The remaining issue involves the science requirement. Present rules provide two ways of fulfilling the obligation in Natural Science: the student can take either one course sponsored by the Gen Ed Committee or two departmental courses. The rules proposed by the CEP would provide three ways to fulfill the requirement: (1) a lower-level Gen Ed course, (2) one departmental course plus one upper-level Gen Ed course, and (3) two departmental courses plus a course fulfilling the requirements for an upper-level Gen Ed course.

The main point of this change is that many students wishing to bypass the lower-level Gen Ed program in the Natural Sciences will have to fulfill the prerequisites of, even if he does not plan to take, one upper-level Nat Sci course. In almost every case, the prerequisite will be a course in, or knowledge of, calculus. The new rules have one obvious advantage. They will help create a core of non-science concentrators well-trained in mathematics. Knowledge that such students exist might induce top-flight professors to teach sophisticated upper-level Gen Ed courses in the Natural Sciences. No other inducement has been able to accomplish this, and the CEP plan is worth a try.

But, in accepting the plan, the Faculty should make clear that it is not setting a precedent for future establishment of a general calculus requirement for all undergraduates. Some professors favor such a requirement. They assume, rightly, that a large minority of the Harvard student body will need calculus during college or graduate school because of the growing popularity of quantitative methods in nearly every discipline of the natural and social sciences. But those who oppose the requirement make what we consider an equally valid assumption: that Harvard students are perceptive and industrious enough to realized their own needs and to meet them voluntarily. Dean Glimp has provided an even more telling argument. He stated last year that a general calculus requirement would prevent the Admissions Committee from accepting candidates who display outstanding talents in the arts or humanities but who have almost no aptitude for mathematics. We thus urge that the CEP plan be approved on its own merits and not as a first step toward a college-wide math obligation.