Bok's Real Revolution

LIKE HARVARD in general, life in the Houses has been pretty dull lately. For a while, halfway through reading period, people used to sit around and talk about exams. "How do your exams look?" one person would say. "My exams look fine," another would reply. "How do your exams look?" So it was probably a good idea for Dean Rosovsky to pop over to Lowell House last week and brighten things up by announcing that he was about to revolutionize education. "It is time to reestablish a consensus which will last another 20 years," Rosovsky proclaimed. Later that night. President Bok added his two cents. "Any really strong, persuasive statement of the purposes and aims of undergraduate education as a whole would have enormous influence" on all of American education, he announced.

Harvard presidents and deans have been revolutionizing education every so often for the past hundred years. It's a preoccupation with them, or so it seems. Late in the nineteenth century, Eliot started the elective system. Early in the twentieth century, Lowell instituted a program of undergraduate concentrations. Later on, Lowell began the House system. And then Conant wrote the red book with its insistence on the principle of general education. Now, less than 30 years after the last educational revolution, Bok and Rosovsky have a brand new revolution up their ivy-covered sleeves.

The only trouble is that these revolutions haven't been revolutionary enough. In fact, when you come right down to it, most of them meant about as much as the committee Bok appointed this fall to study the possibility of studying revolutionizing the calendar.

First of all, the quality of Harvard students' education doesn't have all that much to do with curriculum requirements. Most of the time, it doesn't even have all that much to do with their courses. Secondly, Harvard isn't the paradigm of American education any more, even assuming it was when Eliot and Lowell made their enormously influential innovations.

The education at state universities and community colleges and so on today is a lot more important to a lot more people, with preoccupations different from figuring out first choice on House application forms. In his usual incisive fashion, Bok cut right to the heart of the matter last month, in his Harvard Republican Club address. "Students at Harvard don't have to worry about getting jobs when they graduate," Bok explained. "Now if you went to school at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana, then you might have to worry about getting a job, but you don't have to worry here at Harvard."

Since Bok realizes that Mom Harvard is out of touch with the mainstream of American education, he probably also realizes that if his and Rosovsky's new statement of purposes and aims is really going to have an enormous impact, it'll really have to be revolutionary and not more of this jive curriculum reform. The prexy and the dean have been pretty close-mouthed about what they have in mind for the overhaul of the system, but if you just contemplate the depths of understanding of economics Bok displayed in his talk to the Republicans, it's hard not to conclude that he's been really thinking things out lately.

FIRST OFF, Bok probably plans on abolishing grades--nobody ever learned anything from a grade, after all, except maybe the corporate recruiters who need them to find the most efficient technocrats around--and to establish full university democracy, with all the people who live and work at Harvard helping determine what kind of university they live and work in, with a decisive voice for the people outside the university whose lives it's been affecting for years, usually adversely. Next, he'll probably change the structure of the university so its members spend some time working in factories or living in slums, so they can get a better idea of how most people in the universe live. Samuel Huntington, the theorist of forced-draft urbanization (bombing people's villages so they have to move to cities) will be sent to Vietnam to be forced-draft urbanized. John T. Dunlop, who used to have Rosovsky's job before he moved on to holding the line on prices, will have a slot waiting for him when he comes back. Of course, the slot won't be just what Dunlop's used to, because before he does anything else, he'll want some first-hand experience of keeping up with the price freeze with a working person's income.

President Bok himself is probably just raring to head a university less intent on training people to work as professional adjuncts to the corporations that rule the world, and more concerned with helping people gain control of their lives and with seeking after truth. Stephen S.J. Hall may already have started work on his first book of poems, Long Live the People's Revolution. And the Food Services is probably all set to reorganize itself and announce that even when there's a truckers' strike, union lettuce is cheap at any price. It won't happen in the first hundred days of Bok's and Rosovsky's revolution, and it may not even happen in the first thousand. But if Bok and Rosovsky are serious about their enormous impact on the world of education, they'll have to make it start happening sometime. If they're not serious, it will still happen without them.