An Open Letter From Dean Rosovsky

After a year of intense deliberation, our review of undergraduate education has reached a critical juncture. Most of the seven task forces have concluded their investigations and made provisional recommendations for change. These will now be considered by a coordinating committee, which will design an integrated set of proposals for Faculty debate. The present moment seems appropriate to indicate the major themes that have emerged in our deliberations. I would also take this opportunity to convey my own convictions as to what our priorities should be, and to note those problems that have not yet been addressed.

In the United States, a far higher proportion of young people undertake postsecondary education than anywhere else in the world. Reflecting the character of our population, this large group of college students is exceedingly heterogeneous. Since the Second World War, our national institutions of higher learning have become more open to and representative of young people of diverse backgrounds and talents.

I think there is no comparable institution in the country with a greater claim to representativeness than Harvard College. As Professor John K. Fairbank's Task Force on the Composition of the Student Body has pointed out, our recruitment and selection procedures are designed to yield a group of undergraduates as able and talented in varied ways as the nation can produce. Their parents may be rich or poor; they may be the sophisticated and city-wise children of New Yorkers or the graduates of tiny schools in rural New Mexico; some are ready to perform on the concert stage while others are superb athletes. What unites them are the values--or at least the judgments--of our selectors: each student must be able to pursue a demanding course of academic studies, and possess a special talent or spark--ranging from something as vague as "leadership qualities" to something as concrete as mathematical ability.

We have not, I think, realistically confronted the curricular consequences of our admissions policy. We must learn to distinguish between matriculation and graduation. The basic problem is that our students arrive unevenly--sometimes inadequately--prepared; the variation in their intellectual training is significant. I am not at all disturbed by this fact. To me it is an inevitable consequence of our openness to a large and heterogeneous society. But we should all be disturbed if some of our students graduate with an inadequate education. To ensure that this does not happen, we first need to define a set of standards for undergraduate instruction.

At every Commencement, the President of Harvard University welcomes new graduates of the College "to the company of educated men and women." Having witnessed this ceremony for many years, I must confess to an increasing sense of unease with the phrase. A bachelor's degree may signify little more than the satisfactory completion of a fixed number of undergraduate courses. It is a matter of simple observation that not all college graduates are educated persons, nor are all educated persons necessarily college graduates. Clearly we mean to imply that our students have achieved a certain level of intellectual development. We do not expect them to be learned in the arts, sciences or professions; indeed, we should be disappointed if the bachelor's degree signified the acme of their intellectual growth. Welcoming our graduates to the company of educated men and women makes sense to me only if it expresses our belief that their mental skills and powers have met a reasonable standard.

Can that standard for undergraduate education be articulated at this time? I believe that it can.

1) An educated person must be able to think and write clearly and effectively. By this I mean that our students, when they receive their bachelor's degrees, must be able to communicate with precision, cogency and force.

2) An educated person should have a critical appreciation of the ways in which we gain knowledge and understanding of the universe, of society, and of ourselves. Thus, he or she should have an informed acquaintance with the mathematical and experimental methods of the physical and biological sciences; with the main forms of analysis and the historical and quantitative techniques needed for investigating the workings and development of modern society; with some of the important scholarly, literary, and artistic achievements of the past; and with the major religious and philosophical conceptions of man.

This ambitious definition may appear impractical. Most of us, as members of the Harvard faculty and as professional scholars, would have to confess our own difficulty in measuring up to such a standard. But that is a shortsighted view. First, to have a stated ideal is valuable in itself. Second, the rather general phrases that I have used to translate into standard subjects: physics, biology, mathematics, history, the various social sciences and the humanities. Lastly, I am not suggesting that each of these subjects should be mastered by every educated person. Stress should be put on the concepts of "critical appreciation" and "informed acquaintance", for these can make the ideal realistic.

3) An educated American, in the last third of this century, cannot be provincial in the sense of being ignorant of other cultures and other times. It is no longer possible to conduct our lives without reference to the wider world or to the historical forces that have shaped the present and will shape the future. Perhaps few educated people will ever possess a sufficiently broad perspective. But it seems clear to me that a crucial difference between the educated and the uneducated is the extent to which one's life experience is viewed in wider contexts.

4) An educated person is expected to have some understanding of, and experience in thinking about, moral and ethical problems. While these issues change very little over the centuries, they acquire a new urgency for each generation when it is personally confronted with the dilemmas of choice. It may well be that the most significant quality in educated persons is the informed judgment which enables them to make discriminating moral choices.

5) We should expect an educated individual to have good manners and high aesthetic and moral standards. By this I mean the capacity to reject shoddiness in all its many forms, and to explain and defend one's views effectively and rationally.

6) Finally, an educated individual should have achieved depth in some field of knowledge. Here I have in mind something that lies between the levels of professional competence and superficial acquaintance. In Harvard terminology it is called a "concentration." The theory is straightforward: cumulative learning is an effective way to develop a student's powers of reasoning and analysis. It is expected that in every concentration students will gain sufficient control of the data, theory and methods to define the issues in a given problem, develop the evidence and arguments that may reasonably be advanced on the various sides of each issue, and reach conclusions based on a convincing evaluation of the evidence.

The "minimum standard" approach to undergraduate education is not without problems. Occasionally we encounter a student who fits the category of one-sided genius--the mathematical wizard, for example. As Bertrand Russell has pointed out, someone with the gifts of a Mozart would gain little from a conservatory. But such occurrences are extremely rare, and need not be central to a plan designed for the majority of Harvard and Radcliffe undergraduates. We should always preserve sufficient flexibility to take care of these very special cases.

There could also be political objections. The delineation of a set of standards requires that we as a faculty reach a consensus--which in turn might be read as imposing conformity or, even more fallaciously, as socializing our students on behalf of this country's "ruling classes." I have heard this view expressed by a few students, but I cannot accept its validity. The standards I have suggested do not represent or preclude any political point of view; indeed, they favor the broadening of sensibilities and the displacement of conventional wisdom by critical thinking.

Students will forget many of the facts that they are taught, and new developments will make much of what is imparted today invalid in years hence. I think we might all agree without protracted discussion that an understanding of the value and uses of intellect is essential for an educated person. But the question is: how are "arts and habits" inculcated in a most efficient and lasting manner? Not by a one-sided or specialized curriculum alone, nor by a system of general education that is unfocused and relatively unstructured.

At Harvard, we could quite easily raise our entrance requirements so as to eliminate the need for general education or basic intellectual training. In doing so, we would have no difficulty in filling our entering classes with an adequate number of students. But in my view the social consequences of such a program would be extrememly adverse. Harvard alone--or even in alliance with the major institutions of higher education in this country--cannot reform secondary education in America. Raising our entrance requirements would inevitably make less national the nature of our student body, would favor private secondary education, and would hamper social mobility. I do not think that this is acceptable to our faculty, alumni, or students.

One other issue deserves explicit consideration. I have been suggesting that an educated man or woman must have a rather broad understanding of the liberal arts, and this immediately raises the spectre of superficiality. In attempting to achieve breadth, does one necessarily encourage shallowness? Does not the great danger lie in producing young people who believe themselves to be educated, when in reality they have succeeded only in absorbing a few platitudes? If this were the case, one might conclude that a curricular structure emphasizing greater depth in a very few subjects is preferable.

I think that the assumption of a necessary connection between breadth and shallowness is unwarranted. It is the quality of instruction, not the number of courses, that guards against superficiality. Both "general" and "special" education can be superficial or profound. The successful training of intellect requires teachers who believe in the importance of this approach to undergraduate education and who possess the talents to make it work.

There has been a tendency in recent years to reduce requirements and multiply options in the curriculum of Harvard College. This tendency developed largely in response to the growing diversity and wide-ranging interests of our students. Many of the changes encouraged intellectual vitality. Two important consequences, however, are that the curriculum no longer expresses clearly our basic educational aims and it does not establish a common basis for intellectual discourse. Once we have clarified our goals--which I do not think is the most difficult part of our current review--the next major task is to design a curricular structure that will balance the legitimate claims of individual interest and aspiration with the need for ensuring that Harvard graduates can be accounted fit recruits for the company of educated men and women.