Curriculum Flexibility and Experimentation: Restructuring the University-Part II

( Part I appeared in Monday's CRIMSON.)

(Rick Tilden '71 and Steve Bowman '72 were involved in the activities of New College and are now members of the Committee on Undergraduate Education.)

January Intensive Studies Period

We view the January Intensive Studies period as a time in which the student contribution to the curriculum is acknowledged and augmented and in which experimentation is the rallying cry. Ideally it would be the fruition of the communal ideals that we have been expounding through New College over the past two years. We see the Intensive Study option primarily as a chance for undergraduates and graduate students to direct their own group efforts in learning and teaching through student-initiated and student-led seminar courses and projects. However, we would heartily encourage Faculty involvement in this program as well.

Intensive Studies are to be based in the residential Houses under the administrative jurisdiction of the House Committees on Educational Policy. Since the Faculty of Arts and Sciences has traditionally and right-fully exercised ultimate authority in sanctioning activities as eligible to receive credit toward the degrees it confers, we propose mechanisms to allow Faculty approval for all Intensive Studies.

Starting in September, the HCEP would entertain proposals from undergraduates in its House, from a??graduate student in the University, and from professors in any of the Harvard Faculties. Each Intensive Study proposal would outline the content and method of a course or project to last from three to four weeks in the following January, meeting six or more hours a week. The proposal would indicate who is to be responsible for the direction of the Intensive Study-it may be a student, a professor, or someone from outside the University.

During the latter half of October, the HCEP would interview prospective Intensive Study leaders and discuss their proposals with them, making recommendations to the applicants if they are called for. By the end of the first week in November, each HCEP should compile a list of Intensive Studies it feels could benefit the undergraduates in the House and should file the list, with explanatory information on the Intensive Study leaders, with the docket committee of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. The docket committee would distribute all the HCEP lists to Faculty members for consideration at the regular November meeting of the Faculty or a specially convened meeting during November. As HCEP chairman, each Senior Tutor should present and defend his list before the full Faculty and receive criticisms.

All Intensive Studies approved at this Faculty meeting would be included in a general catalogue of Intensive Studies printed and distributed in early December. Any proposal not included on the docket for the November Faculty meeting could not be considered for the following January. However, proposals that are rejected at that meeting could be reworked and resubmitted in time for the regular December Faculty meeting, after being reviewed by the HCEP. All proposals reconsidered by the Faculty in December and approved could then be included in an addendum to the catalogue.

CREDIT AND LIMITS: Undergraduates and graduate students in Arts and Sciences who enroll in an Intensive Study as participants would receive ungraded credit for the equivalent of one term course. Intensive Study leaders should receive credit for two term courses, to allow them to prepare for their group activities during the fall term. (Other faculties are encouraged to make arrangements for their students to receive course credit for Intensive Studies.) No one would be financially compensated for serving as an Intensive Study leader. Since an Intensive Study should involve intensive work equivalent to at least the load of one term course, a limit of one Intensive Study should be imposed on all participants each January.

Intensive Studies would be considered one-shot exercises, not permanent entries to the curriculum. Experimentation in educational forms should be encouraged, including shared readings and discussion, artistic projects, on and off-campus projects, and meetings with guest resource persons. One group of outside resource persons that we would like to see involved is Harvard alumni.

Arrangements for individual Intensive Studies should also be established. A student could propose to his HCEP a month-long reading project or involvement in some off-campus work. These proposals would be treated like Independent Studies and would not have to be approved by the entire Faculty. But such independent work would normally be able to receive the sponsorship of a member of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

Changes in College Teaching

HIRING AND PROMOTION POLICIES: Ad Hoc committees that recommend Faculty appointments should weigh teaching ability and commitment more heavily in making their judgments. Junior faculty members must not be penalized for demonstrating a solid commitment to undergraduate education. We recommend that the students on the departmental Committees on Undergraduate Instruction be consulted by the members of adhoc committees.

We believe that every Faculty member should devote some time to undergraduate teaching. Since we are encouraging greater flexibility in the apportioning of students' work, we think it only fair that professors should have the same degree of flexibility. To that end, we recommend that the Faculty establish a committee to study the division of Faculty time and to issue proposals to (1) enable each professor and department to make the best use of his or its teaching time and (2) allow for a standard policy of compensating departments for professorial time borrowed for non-departmental education (particularly House-affiliated courses).

Evaluation forms should be given to students to allow them to convey to their professors their reactions to the content and teaching methods of their courses. Students should be encouraged to offer feedback, and professors should be responsive to it.

Many of the large lecture courses given each year should be bracketed and given every other year instead. Lecture courses should, on the whole, be decreased in favor of other teaching and counseling duties for professors. With greater student initiative and responsibility in designing individual programs, the Faculty need not be overly anxious to ensure that the course catalogue cover such a wide breadth of material each year, although there clearly are limits to constructive retrenchment.

Professors who bracket their lecture courses and who still want to lecture during the term should be encouraged to deliver lecture series similar to those of guest lectureships. Departmental compensation might be half a fifth in time, with the other half filled by seminar and advisory work. We would encourage more debates between Faculty members, also.

We encourage professors to experiment with different teaching forms. Joint seminars should be offered to students, with professors outside Arts and Sciences involved. The "debate" between Professors Walzer and Nozick in Philosophy 174 is a method that should be more widely attempted. Flexible scheduling of reading periods in courses will also allow more discussion periods with students participating.

Lecturers should be encouraged to print and/or videotape their lectures for the benefit of auditors and students in courses who miss lectures. Recording lectures for a permanent lecture library would be particularly valuable in courses where professors have been teaching for years and are nearing retirement. Such a lecture library would be uniquely precious resource for the University community.

Advising

Each freshman should be affiliated with one of the residential Houses, with the opportunity to change Houses at the end of freshman year. Eventually, we would like to see the Yard converted to several Houses with communal dining facilities in the Union and Lehman and Robinson Halls.. Informal advice from upper-classmen at the dinner table can serve to complement the assistance offered by official advisors.

Seniors should be included in the pool of official advisors for freshmen. Radcliffe's Senior Sister program is a good model. In the period before the Yard dorms are converted to Houses, seniors should comprise about half the proctor-advisors in freshman entries, receiving free room and board for their services.

All departments and professional schools should issue guidelines for undergraduates, informing them of admissions requirements to post-baccalaureate programs and including sample plans of study designed with those graduate programs in mind.

The Committee on Special Studies should issue guidelines and requirements for Special Concentration programs and should offer counseling services through an advisor recruited expressly to guide undergraduates with "special studies" objectives.

Issue an all-University computerized directory of tutorial resources. Faculty member, graduate students, and upperclassmen interested in serving as counselors or Independent Study supervisors should be listed along with their educational backgrounds and some indication of their accessibility.

The services of the Bureau of Study Counsel and the Office of Graduate and Career Plans should be made more explicit to undergraduates through descriptive brochures.

Alumni should be enlisted as professional counselors so that undergraduates can have greater access to people working out there in the "real world." Each House should extend invitations to its alumni or alumnae, asking them to spend a weekend or so in the guest suite and to make themselves available to undergraduates interested in certain careers. Professional research fellows, such as the Nieman, Kennedy Institute, and Junior Fellows, might also be enlisted.

Evaluation

In general, only work done to fulfill concentration and pre-professional requirements will be graded. All work in General Education can be on a pass/fail or ungraded credit basis, with grades optional. With departmental approval, nongraded work may be counted toward concentration requirements. Since most of the freshman year in our three-year scheme would be Gen. Ed-oriented, most courses taken in the first year will be ungraded. Freshman seminars would continue to grant ungraded credit. At present, too much fear over grades is generated among freshmen and makes adjustment to Harvard or Radcliffe unnecessarily difficult.

A student should be allowed to take an unlimited number of ungraded courses in any term.

A student should also be allowed to change ANY course grade of D or better to a pass after receiving the grade, with restrictions imposed only by concentration and pre-professional requirements. Grades are for the student's benefit alone, and any use he may want to give to his transcript in the future is his own business.

We believe that only successes should be recorded permanently; failures should be crased from the transcript upon the satisfactory completion of an additional course. This is not to deny the educational benefits of failure. In fact, our recommendations are designed to encourage students to explore untried areas of study without the fear that unsuccessful efforts will result in permanent stigmas.

With flexible course loads and a reduced course requirement for the A.B. degree, failing grades will be less onerous and costly in terms of time and money. This change in attitude and atmosphere might allow instructors to heighten their expectations of students' academic commitment and make them less likely to award a passing grade to an undeserving student.

THE PERSONAL PORTFOLIO: Each student should be encouraged to put together a personal portfolio or dossier to include his permanent transcript and samples of his best work. The rationale for this proposal is that a student should be judged as a person and not as a collection of grades. If a student decided to apply for a position in a graduate school or a business establishment, he and his assessors would all benefit from a less impersonal presentation his accomplishments.

Recognizing the demands made on the time of admissions officers and employers, we would not encourage a deluge of written material on the Registrar's office. But we would encourage students to include in their official files copies of their two or three best course papers and copies of their senior essays if they wrote them. The senior essay would normally be completed before the end of the third year; and if a student elected to stay part of a fourth year before going to a graduate school, he could forward a copy of his essay as a part of his application.

The fluid nature of the entire portfolio should be emphasized. A student would be allowed to change letter grades to passes any time after receiving the grades. And he would be permitted, indeed encouraged, to defer including samples of his work in the portfolio until he decided what constituted his best efforts. (Unlimited substitutions would wreak havoc on the Registrar's office).

Our recommendations concerning grades are, to us, a substantial first step away from a deliberately competitive academic system toward one in which a student can gain satisfaction simply by coming to understand a subject and achieving some degree of competence in discussing it. Academic competition is like all others: it creates winners and losers. Our educational philosophy is not so egalitarian as to deny all distinctions among students or so idealistic as to deny the necessity of allotting educational resources discriminatively on the basis of demonstrated ability and commitment. But practical distinctions need not be publicly signified by divisive labels. And academic success need not be viewed as a competitive triumph meriting a distinctive trophy. These are serious issues-we see too many students in our schools competing for labels and trophies without being allowed to appreciate learning for its own rewards and joys. Grades contribute to the competitive climate, of course; but if their evaluative and abbreviational merits can be seen by both students and teachers as primary,grades can cease to be instruments to rank students. We have greater respect for the teacher who grades all his students by the same excessive standards than for the teacher who sets a median score and then curves his students' grades accordingly. In the latter case, the student will see himself struggling against his peers rather than matching his ability to the professor's absolute standards.

With the above arguments as a supportive base, we propose the following changes in Harvard's system of evaluation:

the elimination of Rank Lists and Dean's List. The move toward a more ungraded curriculum makes the traditional criteria for ranking students outmoded.

the dropping of the label "Honors' and the abolition of the three Honors distinctions, cum laude, magna cum laude, and summa cum laude. Although grades (especially when viewed in personal rather than competitive terms) can provide an incentive for academic work, Honors distinctions are determined at the end of an undergraduate career and are little more than trophies awarded for public display. In our opinion, high quality work in the senior year that is motivated by the chance to secure such a trophy is not to be prized. If a student wants to demonstrate his scholarly ability to his future assessors, his portfolio and letters of recommendation should supply ample evidence.

the elimination of the mediancurve grading policy by individual instructors.

in as many courses as individual professors will allow, but particularly in courses taken for a pass or ungraded credit, the institution of an option where-by students may submit papers and projects JOINTLY for a common grade, with the standards of quality, if not quantity, of work commensurate with the number of student contributors. We want to encourage collaborative academic efforts among students for the excitement and insights they can provide. This curriculum plan is the result of such a collaboration.

We would like to see community-wide debate on the issues raised in this plan. We hope that our ideas will elicit enough student and faculty support to induce the Faculty of Arts and Sciences to implement the plan, or at least its essential features. As Dean May said at the end of September, the Committee on Undergraduate Education "must eventually present a package for the Faculty to vote either up or down." Mindful of the flaws inherent in piecemeal reform, we have offered a package that touches on all the issues that have been debated in curriculum discussions over the past two years. The proposals that concern House courses and changes in the House system itself will have to be dealt with by the Committee on Houses and Undergraduate Life as well as our own. We encourage students who want to work for the implementation of this plan to run for either of the two committees next term, and we welcome comments from all sources addressed to either of us at Currier House.