Bok on the Core

There is wide agreement today that the General Education program lacks a clear sense of purpose and permits students to sample from too large and varied an assortment of courses loosely assembled under the broad rubrics of Humanitites, Social Sciences and Natural Sciences. In the words of Francis Pipkin, professor of Physics and a former associate dean for undergraduate education: "The General Education committee feels that it is drifting aimlessly in a strange sea with neither a map nor a compass to guide it."

To remedy this problem, faculty committees have urged that the General Education program be replaced by a core curriculum, a proposal which the entire Faculty is now considering.

The proposed curriculum makes a commendable effort to cure the principal defect of the General Education program. Under the present system, categories such as "Humanities" and "Social Sciences" are simply too broad to capture any coherent educational goals.

When students can satisfy the requirements by taking The Scandinavian Cinema or Biology of Cancer, one inevitably wonders whether the program still reflects any clear sense of intellectual priorities. The current proposal, with its more carefully delineated categories, does much to redefine the fundamental aims of a liberal education and provide a structure to insure that these goals will be reflected in each student's course of study.

Some critics may attack the core curriculum for restricting freedom of choice. In discussions both in Cambridge and around the country, I have found a noticeable difference of opinion on this issue. Undergraduates often argue that they should have the right to choose for themselves and that no single set of requirements can fit the needs of such a diverse group of students.

This is a perennial debate, and the proposal before the Faculty strikes a judicious balance. Although the new curriculum provides more structure than the existing General Education Program, the core itself will take up only a quarter of the entire undergraduate program, and the students will be free to choose among several courses in each required category. In addition, undergraduates will continue to select their own concentration and will have a quarter of their courses reserved for free elective choice.

The new curriculum does not purport to convey a thorough mastery of the major fields of learning; it can only attempt to establish a basic foundation which will help students push further to explore different areas of knowledge with great facility and understanding. It is the responsibility of the College to provide opportunities which will enable students to apply and strengthen the skills and methods of thought they have acquired in the core courses.

Evidence suggests that competence in mathematics and expository writing can quickly erode if their cultivation is left entirely to the freshman year. To avoid this problem, it will be necessary to offer ways of reinforcing these skills at later points in the undergraduate experience. Thus, we will need to encourage instructors to do more to point out errors of grammar, organization, and syntax in evaluating student papers, and we must find ways of providing added help to students with special writing problems. We should likewise make sure that other core courses embody levels of mathematical reasoning that will require students to apply what they have learned in meeting the minimum requirement.

The effort to expose students to other societies and cultures presents problems of a different kind. Since the original report on General Education first appeared, America's role in the world has changed from one of detachment to one of interdependence and permanent involvement. Harvard students are almost certain to spend a portion of their lives working, living and traveling abroad, or engaged in some sort of active endeavor involving other societies and cultures.

What, if anything, can the College provide to help prepare students for these experiences? Certainly a course on another culture will help; so will the foreign language requirement. But the potentialities of the classroom are limited. Books and lectures cannot readily evoke a vivid realization of the human consequences of underdeveloped economics or convey the subtle differences in perspective and attitude that mark another culture. In order to prepare for life in an interdependent world, there is no substitute for living in a foreign land, either to study or, better yet, to work.

If we are serious about helping students to overcome parochialism, perhaps the time has come to review the experience of other institutions in encouraging study abroad in order to discover whether some suitable program can be devised for Harvard. And it is surely important to enlist our alumni in other countries to help us do more to develop opportunities for interesting work abroad.

It is forever tempting to spend all of the time available for education reform reviewing the curriculum in search of a grand design, an eternal blueprint. But we must remember that there have been three great enduring advances in undergraduate education at Harvard during this century and none has been the result of curricular reform.

The first of these changes was the gradual diversification of the student body which raised the intellectual level of the entering classes while adding greater variety of experience, outlook, and talent. The second major change was the introduction of the House system, which improved the quality of life for many students and enabled them to take full advantage of an undergraduate body of such diverse backgrounds and interests. The third and final change was the slow transformation in the manner of teaching College courses so as to emphasize the analysis of complex problems from different points of view instead of simply concentrating on mastering facts and acquiring information.

This last change reminds us that the aims and methods of instructors in presenting their material will often have more importance than the particular subject matter of the course itself. At Harvard and at other colleges, the primary means of instruction remains the lecture; as a student committee correctly observed in 1939, "The lecture method is an effective and economical educational method."

But in order to keep a Harvard education from becoming passive and slack, we must try to balance lectures with a constant counterpoint of papers, seminars, tutorials, and discussion sections where students must first make use of what they have read and heard by developing their own thoughts and then expose their work to the scrutiny of more mature minds. These are the experiences most likely to help students think more clearly and precisely yet it is these experiences that are most endangered across the country by huge enrollments and tight financial constraints.

Fortunately, Harvard has developed a tradition of individualized instruction through freshman seminars, tutorials, course sections, and senior theses. These elements of the curriculum are all strongly supported by faculty, alumni, and students alike. But almost all agree that further progress needs to be made. For example, in a survey several years ago, students, faculty and alumni came to remarkably similar conclusions when they were asked to rank in order of importance more than 30 possible reforms of the College.

In addressing these needs, we should look initially to the first two years of college. Freshmen and sophomores have too few opportunities for engaging in active intellectual work under direct faculty supervision. We provide enough freshman seminars to accommodate only 35 per cent of the class, although students have considered an expansion of these seminars to be one of the most important changes to be made in undergraduate education.

Sophomore tutorial is notably less successful than the junior and senior year counterparts and is not taught by faculty members to any appreciable extent. These deficiencies account, more than anything else, for the common complaint that "students are not really taught by the faculty." Since all studies suggest that colleges make their greatest intellectual impact in the earliest years, there is clearly a problem here that requires a solution.

We surely do not need to take the extreme position that every course be taught in a small group; the costs would be prohibitive, and there is no respectable body of research which suggests that such a reform would produce significant benefits.

What students deserve is an opportunity in each of their first two years to take some portion of their program in the form of seminars or small discussion courses, taught by professors and with frequent opportunities for written work and faculty critique. This goal could be achieved by expanding the number of freshman seminars, by developing additional core courses with small enrollments, or conceivable in other ways.

Although such a commitment would require heavy use of faculty resources, this hurdle should not be insurmountable. In a 1970 College survey, most members of the faculty indicated a preference for teaching undergraduate seminars and tutorials rather than lecture courses. Since graduate enrollments have declined, professors should have more time available to teach undergraduates in smaller settings. And in the largest departments, where faculty-student ratios seem too low to allow enough instruction of this type, we may simply have to enlarge the size of the faculty.

The above article is an excerpt from President Bok's annual report to the University, released last week.