CEP to Spend Summer Over Gen Ed Plans

The Committee on Educational Policy has not yet decided on a new program in General Education and will spend the summer thinking it over Dean Ford said Friday.

Ford, who had said earlier that he expected a new Gen Ed program to be in the hands of the Faculty before the summer vacation, now hopes that the CEP will formulate the new program in September and send it to the full Faculty for action. The revised Gen Ed program should go into effect in the fall of 1966.

The CEP took up consideration of the Gen Ed program in April after a year of faculty debates on the subject. The faculty resolved that Harvard should continue to offer Gen Ed courses, voted 94-57 that they should not be compulsory, and apparently suggested in a final vote on a vaguely worded question, that the CEP formulate a list of "designated" departmental courses that would substitute for Gen Ed courses.

Decisions, Decisions, Decisions

The committee must decide several questions relating to the Gen Ed program as well as those specifically voted on by the Faculty. The Faculty voted to recommend that departments invest 10 per cent of their teaching time in the Gen Ed program (presently, Gen Ed courses account or some seven per cent of all teaching Harvard).

The CEP must decide whether to incorporate this recommendation into the regulations governing the Gen Ed program.

The Doty Committee, whose suggested visions of the program touched off the debate a year ago, recommended that the freshman seminar program, the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, and the Loeb Drama Center be brought under the jurisdiction of the Committee on General education. No Faculty vote was taken on suggestion and the committee will have to decide what to do with it.