Bok's Newest Hobby: Undergraduate Education

THE DICK CAVETT show is a more comfortable forum than Lowell Lecture Hall and we live with the consequences of that. If John Kenneth Galbraith would rather chum around Gstaad with William Buckley, that's his choice, but students at Harvard are unlikely to learn as much from him as they might from someone who spent on occasional winter in Cambridge.

More generally, an often overlooked disadvantage of having war criminals (or whatever) on the Faculty is that they spend their time in Washington advising the president while at Harvard the tutorial system is shot all to hell. Research in Widener and Littauer apparently present attractions capable of competing with the glory of working for the Federal government, but teaching in the College does not, at least not for the men who make names for themselves while they're away from Harvard.

Undergraduate education has been one of the chief casualties of the late sixties. Harvard has been politicized over the past few years. No one (excluding street people) has shown any desire for a University that is a sanctuary. Harvard remains ideologically divided, through the division isn't fatal, and in time we'll probably pride ourselves on our "ideological heterogeneity." Given the current quietist strain in undergraduate life, that time is coming very rapidly indeed. For the last five years the University has successfully dodged a number of issues of conscience--not necessarily irresolvable national problems, but local issues like student discipline and the CRR. If Harvard continues its course for several more years it will have drifted past some of the era's more pressing moral problems without ever really facing up to them, without ever giving them a full hearing. Such a performance may not be an accomplishment to be proud of, but it will mean survival.

Insofar as anyone cared, popular reaction to President Bok's using his annual report to the Overseers for a discussion of undergraduate education wasn't favorable. In the last year Harvard witnessed the occupation of Massachusetts Hall, a long dispute over graduate student aid, an inalterable drift through unpalatable proposals to reform student disciplining methods, and declining income from the Federal government. Bok discussed none of these, but concentrated on undergraduate education. In the context of the last few years--which occupations, controversies and the Washington connection have helped define--his performance was a descent into noncontroversial platitudes while ducking political issues.

ANY DISCUSSION OF undergraduate education is possible only because the political sensibilities of people here are declining. But any discussion must account for the conditions that Harvard's once dominant political passions changed. Recent Harvard classes haven't been as alienated as the people who lived through the University Hall Bust and Kent-Cambodia strike. Pre-meds are a flourishing sub-species and law school admissions preoccupy everyone else. Rampant pre-professionalism makes a quiet student body. But though Sigma Alpha Epsilon is staging a comeback here, parietals will never be popular again. Official university involvement in private College life will be minimal, and Bok's committee of House masters studying sex will be a minor embarassment unless the president makes some major miscalculations.

The House system unfortunately can be written off as nothing more than good living accomodations. House Masters grow more remote, more transient and less sympathetic. Senior Faculty associated with a House provide the residents nothing except an occasional march of the potentates, giving anyone in the dining hall some amusement watching the entire faculty of a Harvard department troop in for a free meal. Some of the grad students and tutors try to redeem the situation, but many of them don't bother. Harvard's administration is disturbed by the situation in the College, with reason: neither the living arrangements nor the instruction of undergraduates are particularly close to any (let alone a particular) collegiate ideal.

Bok's presentation was one of the first public signs of that disturbance. It is a very interesting essay, and the basic uncertainties it reveals are incredible when they come from a Harvard president. The report is a broad, sweeping and vague document, and it is curiously tentative.

HIS ANALYSIS of the College's needs is based on the premise that College life at Harvard has lost its underlying rationale. He points out that one obstacle to reaching any decision on relatively radical educational innovations--like a three year A.B.--is the absence of any sure feel for what constitutes an adequate, much less ideal, undergraduate education.

Bok has abandoned the traditional definition of a Harvard education. In last month's Faculty meeting, he sharply questioned Martin L. Kilson, professor of Government, when Kilson made the standard assertion that grounding in a discipline was an integral and necessary part of an undergraduate's education. In the same debate Bok questioned the practicality of giving college students a secure and sweeping acquaintance with Western Civilization in four years. In this report he has again shown his readiness to toy with the common twofold definition of a College education.

Questions about the necessity of grounding Harvard students in a discipline are hard to answer. Departments and disciplines tend to coincide, and departments, with their budgetary power and orientation toward professional training over-shadow undergraduate concerns. A department usually plans its curriculum to turn out trained specialists and worries little about liberal education. The only rigorous education available in many Harvard departments is a pre-professional one. People uninterested in an academic career can easily be left out in the cold, and special degree committees (Social Studies, History of Science and History and Lit.) become home for those wanting a good, interdisciplinary education, but without the academic orientation desired by the professors running the programs. This "honors-only" approach leads to some pretty bizarre arrangements, and until the number of interdisciplinary, area studies and joint degree programs is expanded, these situations will persist.

BOK'S REPORT is no plan, and he disclaims any hope of seeking a permanent one-shot solution to the problems affecting College education. He specifically spurned the "appoint a committee and study it" approach. Given the way Bok operates, probably that means he is serious about the problem and doesn't want to shelve it. He places emphasis on the corrective value of the gradual and informal evolution away from exams and towards writing papers, away from lectures and towards seminars. Yet the need for a more major dislocation remains. For one thing, all gradual trends aren't favorable to better College instruction--professors are gradually drifting out of contact with College students. If Bok is serious about improving the quality of education in the College, he really doesn't have much choice but to shake things up and see how they settle.

Harvard presidents are drawn like lemmings to the sea by the prospect of initiating sweeping reforms in American higher education. In every generation over the last century a Harvard president has come up with some radical innovation. Late in the nineteenth century Eliot started the elective system; early in the twentieth Lowell began concentrations. Late in his career, Lowell also instituted the House system, and right after the Second World War Conant's General Education Committee wrote the Red Book, and Harvard has lived with its distribution and Gen Ed requirements ever since. Although by no stretch of the imagination can Bok's report to the overseers compare in magnitude to these other, better formulated proposals, he seems to be testing the water for a possible plunge into undergraduate curriculum reform.