Teacups in the Faculty Room

THERE IS an atmosphere of quiet history in the Faculty Room. Located at the guarded heart of University Hall, the room is where the Faculty usually meets, under the watchful eyes of portraits and busts, the brooding eyes of men out of the University's past, who are preserved forever on the walls.

This sense of the room comes from memories of a Faculty meeting last spring. It was one of the first short-sleeve days of the year, the kind that slow down your cold-weather metabolism and make you lazy and listless. As President Bok called the meeting to order just after 4 p.m., the air in the room was sticky, and professors' heads were already starting to nod off to sleep.

Like most Faculty meetings, it started with the reading of a memorial minute--a tribute to a Faculty member who had recently passed away, a long biography of the man's life. By the end there were more nodding heads, and only the faces on the walls--who, like the characters in an existentialist play, were forced eternally to watch on--really seemed to be paying attention.

Bok then went through the agenda, asking about new business and old business, and the Faculty were silent. A professor then read some excerpts from the task force report on concentrations. Bok asked for discussion; the Faculty were silent. Bok asked again if anyone cared to comment on the proposals. The Faculty remained silent. The grandfather clock in the corner resolutely ticked off the seconds, and the faces on the wall looked down. Bok asked one last time. There was a nervous cough from the back of the room and a teacup rattled against a saucer on someone's lap. The Faculty had nothing to say. Bok adjourned the meeting.

It is just this sort of sedate atmosphere that pervades the Faculty Room, which has made possible Dean Rosovsky's long-winded review of undergraduate education. A few years ago, especially after the student occupation of University Hall in 1969, the Faculty were so politically polarized and in such wide disagreement that it was futile even to begin discussing fundamental educational issues. (Yale and Princeton tried to initiate new educational programs during this time, but similar faculty polemics quickly killed their plans.)

But now emotions have cooled, and there seems to be a much greater feeling of consensus in the Faculty. There is a dean like Rosovsky--who, unlike his predecessor, McGeorge Bundy, a lover of controversy and institutional intrigue--is frank about his goals for educational reform and his determination to achieve them. And there is a hope that the combination of such clearly-stated goals and a renewed sense of common purpose in the Faculty will produce a new vision of what a Harvard education ought to be--a program that would enable the University to prepare leaders for the 21st century, and to re-affirm its position at the forefront of higher education.

Instead, however, we are getting a Core Curriculum.

THREE YEARS AGO the Task Force on the Core Curriculum started out with admirable intentions. Following Rosovsky's lead, the committee decided that the current Gen Ed program had grown so uncontrollably that it had lost all sense of coherence. The committee then made a sincere effort to devise a scheme to replace Gen Ed, a scheme that would provide students with exciting courses and a rationale for taking them.

But the effort was doomed from the start. The task force's very name--"Core Curriculum"--predisposed it not to accomplish anything very valuable, for implicit in the name are some fundamentally wrong assumptions about the nature of the modern educational experience.

Most important, the idea of a core mistakenly assumes that the predominantly elite, middle-aged, white, male Harvard Faculty can discover and prescribe a single academic program that is central to the intellectual development of every Harvard student. In reality, however, students will eventually confront life-styles and problems that many Faculty members will never dream of.

The key intellectual skill for today's student is adaptability to the unprecedented rates of social and technological change that will be the primary characteristics of life in the future. A core curriculum, however, actually works against the development of this ability. A core is bound in the present and the past, for it specifies only what current areas of knowledge a person ought to be acquainted with, to meet current conceptions of what it means to be "educated." In essence, then, the Core is a means of perpetuating the existing ways of looking at the world, without necessarily questioning their viability, or asking if there are other, better ways to see.

Instead of encouraging students to engage actively in achieving a perception of reality out of their own experience, and to decide what intellectual experiences will prepare them for that reality, the Core will reward students who passively accept the status quo. And instead of allowing students to deal personally with accelerating change, and to seek out and shape desirable futures, the Core is structured to meet the liberal establishment's notion that students are raw resources that must first be molded to certain specifications before being permitted to fully interact with society.

Of course, the present program of undergraduate education does not do much better than would a core to prepare students to choose between many possible futures. But the particular danger of the Faculty's approval of the Core Curriculum proposal is that such a vote may stand in the way of truly meaningful reform. Historically, the Faculty revise the undergraduate curriculum only about once every 25 years. If the Core is implemented, it could mean that the Faculty will consider their job done, and their responsibilities to undergraduates fulfilled for a long time to come.

UNFORTUNATELY, instead of going back to the drawing board as they ought to, it now appears very likely that the Faculty will approve the Core. Except for a greater emphasis on history (the result of some still mysterious political maneuverings in the Faculty Council last spring by Bernard Bailyn, Winthrop Professor of History), the original task force proposal has come through the grist mill of Faculty committees relatively intact. And the recent inclusion of various by-pass options into the legislation has subdued the fears of Faculty members who thought the requirements might be too restrictive. Thus, it appears as if Rosovsky's meticulously promoted Core Curriculum will be voted in--if not at this afternoon's Faculty meeting (which, breaking with tradition, will be held in the Science Center to accommodate the expected crowd) then at next month's gathering.

And so we will probably get a core curriculum. However, the saddest aspect of the whole affair is not that the Faculty of Arts and Sciences believe in the Core, but that belief here will cause the faculties at other colleges and universities to believe. Because of Harvard's institutional prestige and the corporate power of its alumni, the media have lavished huge amounts of ink on the issue, and outsiders have paid attention to the stories. And even if Harvard is not the actual initiator of a trend (as it was not in the '40s, when the University of Chicago and Columbia were the first to devise general education programs), people still perceive Harvard as the trendsetter. Thus thousands of students across the country may well be forced to suffer the ill effects of programs similar to the Core.

And so, many will be persuaded to believe in core curricula as a progressive vision of undergraduate education. They will believe, even though that vision is just another product of the self-indulgent rattling of teacups in the Faculty Room.