Clearing the Blurs in Education

[The following text is excerpted from the President's report on the 1971/72 academic year, submitted on January 15 to the Board of Overseers. Its complete version began with a statement of his belief that liberal education suffers from a lack of definition: "The most striking point I have observed is the lack of any general understanding of what young men and women should expect to gain from a liberal arts education." Recent currents in academia, he argued, have weakened established notions of what constitutes "basic" knowledge, and to what extent breadth of learning should be sacrificed for depth. He ended his introduction by stating that while educational aims urgently need to be redetermined his present observations "will doubtless undergo many quiet revisions and may well bear little resemblance to the statement I might make some years hence when my involvement with the subject draws to a close."]

IN TRYING TO define the purposes of undergraduate education, I do not proceed from some unconscious notion of the ideal graduate. In the brief space of four years, a college education can make only a limited contribution to the lives of its students; many of the traits and accomplishments that one would most admire depend primarily on a host of other influences and experiences. I have also put aside the subject of how a college can provide the happiest possible existence for its students. Certainly, this is an important aim in itself. Colleges do not merely offer preparation for the future; they occupy four years of a student's life, and an institution should do what it can to make these years absorbing and enjoyable. But this subject would require a report in itself and must await some future occasion. In these pages, therefore, I have chosen to concentrate on describing what a college education can provide that will be of greatest lasting value to undergraduates in their future lives.

The most obvious purpose of college education is to help students acquire information and knowledge by acquainting them with facts, theories, generalizations, principles, and the like. This purpose scarcely requires justification. Information provides the raw material for discourse, inquiry, disputation, reflection, indeed for almost any sort of intellectual activity. For some students, especially in the sciences, the knowledge gained in college may be directly relevant to graduate study. For almost all student, a liberal arts education works in subtle ways to create a web of knowledge that will illumine problems and enlighten judgment on innumerable occasions in later life.

Yet imparting knowledge and information should merely be one of a number of goals for a college. Learning of this sort is highly perishable, quickly forgotten unless it is used frequently by students in their later lives. As a result, the amount of knowledge that our graduates actually retain from their college years is probably much smaller than many of us would like to believe. This problem is compounded in certain fields where information often grows stale and irrelevant or new knowledge steadily overtakes old theories and generalizations. For these reasons, to base a college education simply on the acquisition of information and knowledge is to settle for small stakes indeed.

More important, in my view, is the effort to train the intellect of students. One form in which this occurs is through acquiring a mastery of the various disciplines or modes of conceptual inquiry. This effort constitutes a major justification for the concentration requirement and will often provide the student with a method of understanding and investigating problems of interest even if he does not pursue a career closely related to his major field.

At the same time, even this important aim has its limitations. Several fields of concentration cannot properly be said to possess a distinctive discipline or mode of inquiry; the study of government, or political science, is often cited as an example. In addition, mastering a discipline is no easy matter. The vast majority of students probably emerge from college with an adequate grasp of no more than a single method of inquiry. Even this capacity may erode over time if it does not relate to experiences and problems that recur in the student's later life.

For these reasons, the quest for imparting a discipline should not obscure the need to foster still more basic intellectual skills and qualities of mind. Such skills and qualities will be useful to a student in almost any occupation and in innumerable contexts quite outside his (or her) career. Their pervasive utility suggests that they will endure longer than most other forms of learning and will provide the college with an essential means for coming to grips with the problem of how to provide students with something of lasting value in a changing, unpredictable world.

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Essential to the wise use of these skills are certain qualities of mind. Although each reader may compile his own list, let me offer a few illustrations. I would include the quality of open-mindedness--a respect for other points of view as well as a tolerance for ambiguity growing out of the realization that many subjects and problems give rise to a variety of respectable opinions rather than right and wrong answers. I would also mention a respect for facts and a willingness to pursue them even to uncomfortable conclusions. I would add the quality of commitment--a willingness to make tentative conclusions in the face of ambiguity, differing views and incomplete information. I would certainly include a taste for learning and continued independent work to expand one's knowledge and understanding.

Another important aim of a liberal arts education is to engender broad intellectual and aesthetic interests that will survive and grow after graduation. The importance of this goal can scarcely be overestimated. The pressures of vocation and career are particularly intense in our society. Individuals abound who have grown so immersed in their work that they become narrow human beings--unable to appreciate much of what goes on around them, incapable of enjoying their leisure hours, and bereft of resources for the period late in life when they no longer have their careers to sustain them. The point of encouraging serious intellectual pursuits, however, is not simply to enrich the hours away from work, important as that may be. Without a breadth of interests, one may lack the learning and imagination to make the wise and creative judgments that no amount of professional competence can guarantee. In Harold Taylor's words: "Liberal education in its true sense is not an education which you get over with in order to go on to an adult preoccupation with professional academic studies. It is the source of ideas and attitudes which infuse the professional studies with their meaning for society and mankind."

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Yet another goal for a liberal arts education is to provide an atmosphere that assists the student in making tentative choices about his future. I do not speak simply of choosing a career but of the broader decisions concerning the role that one would like to play in society and the contribution that one feels best equipped to make. At this point, more conservative critics may draw back, protesting that the business of the university is academic learning and not the personal development of its students. Nevertheless, I am persuaded that his is too narrow a view to take of undergraduate education. A residential college occupies a predominant share of the time, energy and experience of students during four vital years in their development, years that fall immediately prior to important choices of role and career. Having assumed this position, the college must pay attention to those critical choices insofar as it is capable of doing so.

Such decisions require that students gain a developing awareness of their values, capacities, limitations and interest together with an understanding of the various roles and opportunities available for spending a useful, productive life. To some degree, the needed personal awareness may be furthered through courses and readings in the humanities that add to a student's store of vicarious experience. Greater involvement of the professional schools in the undergraduate curriculum may enrich this experience in ways that do not merely provide preprofessional training. Even greater opportunities lie outside the curriculum--by creating a student body of diverse backgrounds, by bringing older persons to the campus from many different walks of life, by providing capable counseling and career services and even by encouraging students to take time off to seize interesting opportunities for work away from the campus.

THE PURPOSES I have just described may strike some readers as rather obvious. Nevertheless, it is reasonably clear that neither the curriculum nor the formal process of educational development and reform is organized in optimum fashion to further these objectives.

For example, neither students nor advisers are made aware in any systematic way of the various purposes just described. The catalogue of courses by which students plan their study describes the curriculum almost entirely in subject matter terms. The requirements to which they must conform speak in similar fashion; all students must concentrate in one subject area and distribute the rest of their courses among other broad fields. These requirements are general enough to give the student great freedom to choose an interesting program. But if students wish to discipline their minds in ways that will be useful in later life, it is not clear that the institution offers much help in explaining how best to achieve this goal.

Similarly, the curriculum grows without much conscious effort to achieve the various purposes just defined. New courses and programs appear, but they are usually added either because students manifest a desire to become acquainted with a new subject or area of human affairs or because the Faculty believes that some new body of knowledge is sufficiently interesting or important to be included in the curriculum. New courses are also created as professors are recruited to the Faculty. For entirely worthy reasons, however, the new professors are chosen because of their ability to explore particular areas of knowledge or subfields; the courses they teach within their special fields appear in the catalogue without much care being taken to determine whether they happen to serve any particular aim other than to impart knowledge.

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As one examines the different modes of educational change, one suspects that the informal process is critical and that the task of the dean or the educational administrator will be to find ways of encouraging this process to move more rapidly in constructive directions. In some ways, this conclusion is disappointing. One longs to attack the problems of undergraduate education quickly and systematically by an eminent committee that will find some grand design to inspirit both students and faculty. Yet the limitations of the committee process seem sufficiently profound to suggest that such efforts will fall far short of realizing objectives of the sort I have enumerated here.

APART from these generalizations, what directions do these purposes suggest for the development of undergraduate education at Harvard? This is not a simple question, for it should be apparent by now that all of the aims I have described are already being pursued to some extent within the College. Hence, the task at hand involves more of a gradual change of emphasis than a basic restructuring. Yet there are many useful steps to be taken. Let me offer six examples:

1. It would be desirable for certain departments, as well as the Committee on General Education, to devote more thought to the relationship between their fields of interest and the purposes of undergraduate education.

a. In a department where most concentrators go on to pursue careers in very different areas, the faculty should take special care to consider what students can learn of lasting value by their work in the field. What sort of knowledge may enlighten students in a broard range of careers or be useful in contexts quite outside their vocations? Is it possible to offer a course that will provide rigorous discussion of problems of value and moral choice that arise within the field? How can sections, tutorial, seminars and the like be arranged to encourage habits of disciplined thought and qualities of mind of enduring value to the student?

b. With respect to General Education, I would raise the question whether it is sound to classify courses only according to broad fields of knowledge. To be sure, methods of classification cannot be too neat, one purpose of General Education (and House courses as well) should be to provide a home for the interesting and novel offering which does not fit established categories. Nevertheless, one wonders whether additional groups of courses could be established which are more directly related to important educational aims. Could one provide a series of courses on basic statistics, quantitative methods, the computer, and other "languages" that are needed to address a growing range of problems or gain access to important bodies of thought? Could one encourage courses devoted to problems of moral choice? Would it be possible to group courses together which attempt to provide a basic understanding of painting, literature, music and other forms of art? This is more than merely a matter of classification. The process of identifying groups of courses along these lines will alter the way in which the institution informs its students about its aims while encouraging greater effort to insure that the curriculum responds to important educational objectives.

2. As I have previously observed, the information and advice given to students are heavily weighted toward describing the bodies of knowledge that will be covered in the courses offered. Little effort is made to help students to decide what they wish to accomplish through their college education and how they might best realize their aims. Many universities have tried to meet this problem by devising new schemes of faculty advising. These efforts almost uniformly fail, since many professors are too preoccupied with their teaching and research to give more than perfunctory advice. Moreover, such schemes are seriously limited by the fact that the adviser is usually familiar with only a small segment of the curriculum.

In view of these limitations, there is much to be said for transmitting more information and advice in written form in ways that give some thought to the connections between the curriculum and more enduring purposes of undergraduate education. We have already taken a step in this direction with the recent publication of Perspectives on Concentrations in which established scholars attempt to describe the opportunities and values of pursuing work in their particular fields. Similar efforts might be made to describe the purposes of undergraduate education so that students could compare the views I have expressed with those of other faculty members possessing greater experience and different points of view. Finally, consideration could be given to expanding the descriptions of courses in the catalogue to include added material of value to students in choosing their programs. In particular, such descriptions might do more to indicate what instructors hope to achieve by offering their courses and what material and methods of instruction they will use to achieve these aims. Including material of this kind could swell the size (and cost) of the catalogue to unmanageable proporations. Nevertheless, even a limited set of expanded catalogues in the hands of advisers might greatly improve their ability to offer help to their advisees.

3. It would also be desirable to encourage methods of instruction that emphasize the training and disciplining of the mind. Since most instruction of this kind needs substantial student participation and continuous feedback from the instructor, it is more easily accomplished in the seminar, section and tutorial. We have already taken steps to reduce the emphasis on large lectures by subsidizing efforts to introduce self-paced instruction and to explore ways of curtailing lectures in favor of small-group instruction. But much remains to be done. Recent surveys of the College reveal a steady decline in the participation of Faculty members in tutorial. Like course sections, tutorial is staffed predominantly by graduate students. The graduate teaching fellows are often selected primarily on the basis of financial need rather than experience or ability to teach. Many of the tutors and section heads receive little orientation or preparation for their work. Despite many outstanding exceptions, Faculty members often give little help or supervision to their teaching fellows. Graduate students seldom have the opportunity to engage in seminars or colloquia devoted to the problems they will encounter as teachers and educators; they are often not even encouraged to use resources already available at Harvard for developing their abilities as teachers. Little thought is given by many departments either to the relationship of sections and tutorial to the broader purposes of undergraduate education, or to the materials, problems and methods of instruction best calculated to enable tutorial and sections to achieve these ends. In view of these deficiencies, there is ample cause to consider whether more time and effort by the faculty should not be diverted from proliferating new courses toward greater involvement in sections and tutorial, either by participating directly in teaching or by helping the teaching fellows to discharge their responsibilities more effectively.

4. A special attempt should be made to improve the freshman year. Efforts to enrich and improve the curriculum arise most naturally from the interests of professors and the concerns expressed by students. Both these forces tend to be weakest in the freshman year. Students do not become actively interested in the curriculum until they are sopomores or juniors. Faculty members naturally take greater interest in work of a more advanced nature, a process easily observed through the decline of Faculty involvement in freshman courses and the increasing reliance in these courses on the use of sections taught by graduate students. These tendencies are unfortunate, for such research as exists on student learning suggests that the freshman year presents by far the greatest opportunity to have a constructive impact on the minds of the students. As a result, it is important to increase the number of freshman seminars, improve the quality of the basic course in expository writing, and encourage the highest quality of instruction in the sections of the large freshman courses.

5. Almost all of the important activities of the College can contribute to the cultivation of lasting interests outside the student's main vocational thrust. Ideally, the entire curriculum should foster a range of enduring intellectual interests. In particular, a carefully conceived concentration should encourage the student to pursue the subject throughout his life with a reasonably sophisticated degree of understanding. There is one area, however, in which specific steps might be taken and that is in the arts. To be sure, there is already a wealth of interest and activity in music, drama, painting, sculpture, and creative writing. At the same time, more emphasis could be placed on giving students who are not department concentrators a basic understanding of the arts, particularly in music and the visual arts. Much could also be done to provide more supervision for practice in the arts, for without a disciplined foundation, no interest in painting or sculpture or music is likely to survive and grow after graduation.

Efforts to provide such supervision often become mired in a debate over whether or not to award credit for such activities. Yet competent supervision in the arts seems well worth encouraging even if credit is not offered, for students seem to enroll in large numbers even on an extracurricular basis. Moreover, the issue of credit could be pursued more fruitfully by exploring new ways of combining performance with analysis and formal study in the manner developed with great success within the Music Department.

6. More attention needs to be paid to assisting students in deciding how they wish to spend their lives after graduation. The percentage of Harvard seniors undecided about their future careers rose from less than 8% in 1967 to over 30% in 1972. In part, this growth reflects the mounting skepticism and doubt among college students toward accepted values and traditions in the larger society. In part, the trend is also a result of the expanding number of opportunities from which to choose. The question remains, what can the College do? To a considerable extent, the curriculum already provides a means of acquainting students more fully with their strengths and weaknesses, their aptitudes and their interests. Many courses, particularly in the humanities, provide a wealth of vicarious experience which can work in subtle ways to help students to understand how best to lead their future lives. Yet there are also more direct ways by which the College can help. For example, graduate schools might be persuaded to offer one or more courses in the professions. The impact of the professions on the society is surely enough to make them a fitting object of study in a liberal arts curriculum, and such study might have the added benefit of offering a perspective on careers that are of major interest to students. In addition, now that 20% or more of our undergraduates interrupt their studies to take a semester or a year away from Harvard, the College can do a great deal to make these intervals more fruitful. By helping to locate interesting and useful jobs and other opportunities away from Cambridge, the College may assist students in gaining a greater understanding of themselves and the society which they must enter and thus assist them in deciding what to do next.

In order to bring needed perspective to this discussion, let me conclude by reverting to an earlier theme. Despite the need for devoting more thought to the aims of undergraduate education, a sense of purpose will only carry us so far. The variety of institutional process requires a diversity that can never be wholly captured in any set of institutional goals. It is also infinitely more important for the College to assemble a talented, motivated student body and a faculty of the highest intellectual distinction. With these ingredients, the experience of college will usually prove interesting and valuable to the student. Without them, the experience will probably be shallow and uninspiring however carefully the institution's goals are defined. For these reasons, I can argue for paying closer attention to our purposes while still emerging from my first year in office with a feeling of awe and respect for the richness of talent and activity that gives such value to a college education at Harvard