Looking Backward

"Every damn thing they asked for, we gave them just like that," one member of the Faculty's Committee on Educational Policy said last week. The "they" are the members of the Harvard Policy Committee which last year managed to push `````````````proposal after proposal through the CEP.

The issue in the fall was pass-fail and when the year began the HPC's chances of getting anything passed looked bleak. The spring befeore had seemed a real boggle as the new HPC repudiated a pass-fail plan by their predecessors which was close to adoption.

But the HPC shrewdly dropped the financially tricky rider of a free fifth course (part of their original scheme) and were given a political boost by Yale's highly publicized "pass-fail" plan late in the fall. More important was a lot of routine political legwork--testimony before the CEP, interviews with Dean Ford and other CEP members. By the time the proposal to allow every student to take one of his courses ungraded came to a vote in November there was no argument. The CEP approved it unanimously and after a few weeks to arrange implementation, the Faculty passed it too.

The pattern was repeated less than a month later when the CEP softened up another traditional target of student attack on academic restrictiveness--the language requirement. The requirement was chopped from two years to one for those who don't show the necessary level of competence when they enter. The requirement now becomes simply one of a year's exposure--the CEP reasoned that two years didn't insure a very high level of competence and that the second year for many was more of a torture than an educational experience. While softening up the requirement itself, the CEP toughened another rule; all who haven't met the requirement will have to do so during their freshman year.

After the language requirement changes were passed, Dean Ford commented that the Faculty was probably glutted on academic liberalization for the year. But early in the spring the CEP approved what looked to be the most radical change of all--opening Independent Study (previously a haven for honors Juniors and Seniors) to all upperclassmen in all rank list groups. Actually the CEP was doing little more than validating what it found to be the evolutionary development of Independent Study. It had originally been intended as course reduction to accommodate eccentric schemes of the college's best students, but now about 300 students per term use the program to take oneman courses and there is little logic to restricting this opportunity to the best students.

Less conspicuous than its recommendations to the CEP were a series of influential HPC department audits. These detailed written studies of what ails Harvard's various fields of concentration have become consistently potent politically. An audit of the History Department in the fall dealt a death blow to general examinations which were to be required of Juniors. The most remarkable HPC audit was one of the Department of Architectural Sciences. Composed by students who were in close consultation with Faculty in the department, it wrote the design for a new department of Visual and Environmental Studies which the Faculty created this Spring.

The HPC's effectiveness can be variously explained: by the hero, elite, or secrecy theory. The hero theory credits the HPC achievements to its 1967-68 chairman, Henry R. Norr '68, an extraordinarily shrewd and articulate advocate of the student proposals. The elite theory holds that the HPC gets things done because its members aren't elected (they are chosen by House Masters and House committees) and are therefore more capable than the kind of student who goes in for campaigning in student elections. A final explanation of the HPC's success (held by many of the members) is that they get things done by meeting in secret, debating questions without the restraint of observers, and hammering out positions which the whole committee backs.

Probably all of these contribute to the HPC's success but they are simply subsets of a dominant characteristic: an unusual willingness to play the legislative game by the Faculty's rules. Lucid position papers, frequent compromise, and judiciousness are all highly valued in the Faculty, and the HPC has been able to push cautiously and successfully for the none-too-radical reforms it has advocated.