Reform In the College

Earlier this year David Riesman '31, Ford Professor of the Social Sciences, made a comment typical of Harvard Faculty attitudes toward student expectations: "They want all the advantages of Harvard combined with all the advantages of Swarthmore."

Whether or not these expectations are "unrealistic," as Riesman called them. Harvard undergraduates continued this year to sound their ever-present complaints about the amount of attention they receive from campus luminaries in return for the $5000 a year they pay to study in Cambridge. A poll taken by the Educational Resources Group this spring reported that close to 70 per cent of the 2000 Undergraduates surveyed were dissatisfied with the amount of contact they had with Faculty members.

Yet while Harvard continues its relentless expansion and becomes more and more unlike a small college such as Swarthmore. Dean Rosovsky over the past year has sought to galvanize Faculty interest in undergraduate instruction as part of his broad examination of education in the College.

Since issuing his "Letter to the Faculty on Undergraduate Education" in October, Rosovsky has set up seven "task forces" to research and make recommendations on such issues as concentrations, curriculum requirements, teaching techniques, the composition of the student body and student life outside the classroom. The vacation will delay much of their work, but several of the committees will meet over the summer.

The process of setting up the nuts-and-bolts machinery to research the issues raised in the October letter has been a slow one, as Rosovsky himself admits. But, despite the inevitable delays of red tape, educational reform has been a more frequent topic of discussion at Harvard this year than it has in a long time: witness the great number of letters Dean Rosovsky has received from students and 200 faculty members.

They had a lot to discuss. Rosovsky, in his letter, set as his objective nothing less than "an effort to reinterpret (and make more explicit) for our own time the broad educational principles that have guided us in the past." Citing the increased size and specialization of the Faculty as well as the changing needs of a more diverse student body. Rosovsky wrote of the need for a "renewed vitality and distinction in the intellectual atmosphere of the College."

Rosovsky's proposed examination of education at Harvard inevitably raised comparisons with the 1945 Harvard study entitled "General Education in a Free Society," commonly referred to as the "Redbook." The announced scope of Rosovsky's undertaking led many to believe that it would eventually call for changes as far-reaching as the Redbook's proposals for the broad, interdisciplinary "General Education" courses, that have been a mainstay of curricula at Harvard and many other colleges throughout the country.

Rosovsky, however, refuses to accept the mantle of the landmark education reformer. "We're not writing a Redbook," he said last week. He said that rather than aiming for a final definitive report, he plans to oversee an ongoing discussion for a year or more that will produce various recommendations. "If five or ten proposals emanate from the study," he said, it will "please me as much as a final report."

Indeed, in an educationally more complex, pluralistic society, Harvard is no longer in a position to devise reforms that will alter the quality or nature of the nation's institutions of higher learning, as it did in 1945. In fact, given the attitudes of Faculty members in a research-oriented university like Harvard, Rosovsky's study will have achieved no little success if it is able to maintain the Faculty interest in undergraduate education elicited by its initial stage.