On Academics: Students, Architects Express Ambivalence

As do the Law Businessand Medical Schools, the GSD seeks to train students for a professional career, more than exploring architecture as an art, and that mission shapes its instruction and planning. McCue's extensive proposals for additions to the curriculum fall into two main categories--postgraduate, business-oriented programs for design students who already have degrees and for mid-career professionals, and a much smaller program preparing researchers and teachers.

To stay on the forefront of changes in the design world, the school maximizes student contact with practicing architects and planners. More than half of the school's voting and non-voting faculty is made up of professionals who teach part-time.

In addition, the alumni association arranges a number of opportunities for students to meet with GSD graduates in forums, tours of local projects--like Boston's Copley Place, designed by a team under Howard Elkus, who took a master's in architecture from the school in 1963--and in "yield parties" around the country, where alumni meet with applicants who have been accepted to the school and encourage them to choose the GSD.

Still, criticism of the school comes from both sides--from designers who say the school hasn't done enough to respond to changing conditions in architecture and design, and from others who charge the GSD has lost its leadership position because it has become overly professionally-oriented and vocational.

"There's no question that Harvard used to be the premiere school in architecture and landscape architecture in the world, but that terminated 15 years ago," says Ian L. McHarg, chairman of the landscape architecture and regional planning department at Penn's school of design.

McHarg says the school needs to add exactly the kind of new advanced degree programs McCue is pushing, because rapid technological changes in design, most notably the explosion of the use of computers.

Daniel Liebeskind, a prominent architect and head of a small but highly respected architecture school at the Cranbrook Educational Community in Michigan, agrees that "in general, the GSD really falls short of its mandate to be a leading school of architecture in the country," but for a different reason.

"As a school, it is quite irrelevant to what is happening today, to the renaissance which is happening outside of institutions like Harvard," says Liebeskind. "They should dynamite the stifling curriculum and release the energy of their students. The school should be open to the most contemporary and radical trends in architecture."

"I think the school tries to produce students that have a level of competency, but you ought to be more than competent--you ought to be poetic," says fourth-semester architecture student Jonathan Marvel. "The school tries to do everything, and in doing so I think it loses a lot in the field of theory."

"One of the school's biggest strengths is the faculty that it could draw here," says one third year architecture student, "but so far they have not been using the power of the name 'Harvard' to bring in stronger faculty. I think we could be getting a lot more interesting and educational people."

Both Liebeskind and other architects however, credit Professor of Architecture Henry N. Cobb, chairman of the school's architecture program, with drawing more different philosophies into the program and in allowing students more flexibility than had been given in the past.

Cobb's primary change in the structure of the seven-semester master's program, the first four semesters of which are a strict core program with few electives, has been to reintroduce the requirement of a thesis, a requirement cut in 1969.

"The importance of the thesis is that, having had two years of what you might call 'brass tacks' and a year of exploring with visiting critics. I feel it's necessary to give students an opportunity to formulate their own ideas before going out into practice," says Cobb.

Despite its troubles, other architecture school officials maintain that Harvard remains the best school in the country, and a recent poll of architects did put the GSD in first place.

"The Harvard school is number one in the country," says Robert M. Maxwell, dean of Princeton's school of design. "It's not just a snob school--it seems to be very concerned with education. Harvard still stands for social responsibility in architecture."

"It has great strengths," says James S. Polshek, dean at Columbia's school of design. "There are only two schools that really compete for the best students, and those are Columbia and Harvard. It really comes down to a kind of tossup between them."

Although students split on how they view the school's strengths and how they feel McCue's proposals will improve the curriculum, many criticized the Dean strongly at a recent meeting, both because they feel the new programs could make their degrees obsolete, and because they are annoyed that they had been left out of the discussion process.

"The dean's running his own ballgame, and he's going to keep everything in his tanned little hands," says Alan Rubin, co-chairman of the GSD's fledgling student forum, which was started just this year. "Nobody wants a degree in urban design if the program has been changed or reduced so that their work means nothing."

However, McCue says he is "not inviting students into the dialogue at this point," and many other GSD students say they support McCue's plans. "I actually don't perceive that much opposition to the dean's program among students," says first-year landscape architecture student Peter Vander Eb. "I think it's been blown out of proportion."