Summers Wades Into Core Review

University President Lawrence H. Summers has emerged as an active participant in the group charged with authoring concrete proposals for the future of general education at Harvard, marking Summers deepest foray into the details of the curricular review process to date.

This involvement comes as the committee he sits on—one of several responsible for turning the 57 curricular recommendations issued last spring into legislation for the Faculty’s consideration—appears to be retracing old ground.

An original working group on general education spent almost a year mulling pedagogical theory before recommending the abolition of the Core curriculum. But some professors criticized the April curricular report for lacking a guiding vision or over-arching rationale, and now members of this latest committee say they have returned to broad questions of educational philosophy. The general education committee is the only one treading on such explicitly familiar territory.

Summers is a non-voting ex-oficio member of the committee, and according to fellow members has been attending all the biweekly, two-hour meetings and has participated actively in the discussion.

At least one professor says he suspects that Summers’ increasing involvement is an attempt to push the process forward more quickly. “[He] wanted to make some progress,” says Kenan Professor of Government Harvey C. Mansfield ’53, who is not on the general education committee, and has been a sharp critic of the review.

Summers’ stepped-up involvement also comes following turnover in the ranks of the curricular reviews leadership. Senior Lecturer on Economics Jeffrey Wolcowitz abruptly left his position as manager of the curricular review this fall, leaving Kirby, Summers, and Gross alone at the helm.

Dean of the College Benedict H. Gross ’71, who serves alongside Summers as another ex-officio member of the general education committee, says the president’s commitment is not a new or surprising development, and that he has been heavily invested in the curricular review since it began two years ago.

Last year, Gross says, Summers met with the chairs of all the working groups to hear about their recommendations.

“We try to attend as many meetings as we can, and participate in the general discussion,” Gross wrote in an e-mail. “[Dean of the Faculty William C. Kirby] is the chair of the committee, and he sets the agenda.”

“It’s by no means unusual that a president play a role ex-officio in these matters,” Kirby wrote in an e-mail. “Such was the case with President Bok, and, before him, President Conant, in the two most recent major reviews.”

Summers’ presence, though, is one that is felt.

“If you’ve ever been in the room with him, you know he’s there,” says Clowes Professor of Science Robert P. Kirshner ’70. “He’s a very active participant. These presidents, they take this stuff seriously.”

But some committee members express concern about the effect that presence will have.

Undergraduate Council President Matthew W. Mahan ’06, who serves as a student representative on the committee, says that although Summers does a good job of framing the conversations, he worries that “some members of the committee are less prone to voice dissent when he’s in the room.”

But Johnstone Professor of Psychology Steven Pinker says Summers does not inappropriately dominate the conversation. “[Summers] doesn’t guide the meeting—he raises his hand like everyone else,” Pinker says. “He has strong opinions which he voices. He talks to people outside the meetings.”

Summers declined to comment on his involvement in the committee, saying only that he hoped for the group to further develop a system that could effectively replace the Core.

Pinker says that Summers also played a role in helping Kirby call upon some of the most well regarded members of the faculty to take part in this reevaluation. In addition to Kirshner, Kirby also asked Professor of English Louis Menand, Pinker, Bass Professor of Government Michael J. Sandel and Professor of Romance Languages and Literature Diana Sorensen, who co-chaired the working group on concentrations last year.

A RUBBER STAMP?

Summers and his committee are aiming to issue a new round of recommendations to the Faculty next semester. But it is unclear how their proposals will differ from those presented last spring.

Kirshner, who called the year-end report helpful if not completely definitive, said his colleagues did not want to simply apply a “rubber stamp” to the previous group’s work or approve measures without first considering them for themselves.

“People are just too busy for that,” he says. “I don’t think it’s just self-pride. If you ask people to help out, they’re going to want to think about it. You have to get to the beginning before you can make progress.”

Last spring Kirby said this committee would consider how best to implement the report’s recommendation that Harvard establish a distributional requirement supplemented by broad “foundational and integrational” classes called the Harvard College Courses. Students would be required to take an as yet undetermined number of courses in each of the following areas: the social sciences, life sciences, physical and engineering sciences, and humanities, as well as a general studies division, which would include a focus on international studies. Harvard College Courses would be one way to fulfil the distribution requirement.

Faculty members were quick to criticize the report after its publication. At a May 18 meeting, professors said the recommendations were too vague and disjointed, lacking a clear ideological direction.

At the time, Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures Julie A. Buckler told the Faculty that while she “appreciate[s] the report’s broad contours...it still remains to develop a guiding vision.”

With the faculty’s criticisms in mind, Kirshner says the new general education team has decided to establish a firm philosophical consensus before they move on to more pointed discussion. And because Sandel is the only one in their midst who was involved in last year’s work, they must trudge through familiar territory before proceeding, he adds.

—Staff writer Leon Neyfakh can be reached at neyfakh@fas.harvard.edu.