Faculty, Students Kick Review Into Gear

Some might say the curricular review began on October 7, 2002, when Dean of the Faculty William C. Kirby declared its official launch in a contemplative, energetic letter to all members of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS).

Others might say that the review began five years earlier, when administrators began tweaking various parts of the nearly thirty-year old Core Curriculum. Still others might insist that the process did not truly begin until last May, when a steering committee and four specialized working groups were rounded up to begin brainstorming.

Despite these ambiguous beginnings, faculty and students are beginning to actively respond to nearly three years of vague discussion and quiet decision-making.

And by next September, the landscape of the curricular review may turn into a battlefield.

A report drafted by Associate Dean of the College Jeffrey Wolcowitz is scheduled to be presented to the faculty at their May 4 meeting, stimulating a year of debate before a Faculty-wide vote next spring.

By next fall, therefore, the original committees will be dissolved and issues that have remained behind closed doors will be put to public, and potentially contentious, debate.

Thus, to garner the support of the full Faculty, the review must now take a new turn. It must look outwards, reaching out to students and professors, many of whom feel as though they have been relegated to the sidelines up to this point.

BACK TO THE BEGINNING

By the time this campaign was underway, the University had already established a tradition of updating the curriculum every twenty five to fifty years.

In 1870, University President Charles W. Eliot instituted a new elective system, and President A. Lawrence Lowell started the modern incarnation of distribution requirements soon after he entered office in 1909.

By the time President Derek C. Bok and Dean of the Faculty Henry A. Rosovsky took office in 1971 and 1973 respectively, the Lowell curriculum had grown stale, and the two oversaw a review which resulted in the implementation of the Core in 1978.

From the beginning of his presidency, it has been no secret that University President Lawrence H. Summers’ has been planning major upgrades for the undergraduate program, and during his inaugural speech in October 2001, he laid out some general goals for the College which he hoped would eventually be chiseled into concrete legislation through the curricular review.

Summers said he would focus on increasing student-faculty contact, reviewing the Core curriculum, integrating curricular and extracurricular education, making concentrations more flexible and improving science education

When Dean of the Faculty Jeremy R. Knowles retired in 2002, Summers handed the reins over to Kirby, who agreed to oversee the curricular review upon his appointment.

That September, Kirby appointed Leverett Professor of Mathematics Benedict H. Gross ’71 to orchestrate the review.

A month later, the newly formed duo made their first move in Kirby’s letter to FAS, announcing the review’s official beginning and ushering in a “year for thought, discussion [and] reflection” on the foundations of undergraduate education at Harvard.

By spring 2003 the working groups were in place, and the 50 committee members were assigned to study either overall academic experience, pedagogy, concentrations or general education.

With Gross assuming a new post as Dean of Harvard College, Wolcowitz assumed responsibility for managing the review and has been charged with writing the report, which will be passed on to committee members for one final revision before its May release.

“We want to produce a coherent document,” Wolcowitz says. “We are collecting the summaries from the various working groups of their main points.”

While the May report will contain the most concrete recommendations to date, Wolcowitz stresses that it will not contain official legislation.

“There will be greater specificity in what we will put out next, but it will not be so specific that people will be able to vote ‘yay’ or ‘nay,’” he says. “Will it argue for certain specific things? Yes. Which ones? I’m not ready to say.”

SPREADING THE WORD

In November 2002, Kirby and Gross made two separate visits to the Undergraduate Council (UC), where they outlined the motivations for the review and emphasized the breadth of potential changes.

Gross also moderated two panels about the review—one about the future of the Core and another in which deans from Yale, Brown, and Columbia weighed in on Harvard’s place in academia.

Despite the promotional efforts, only about 50 people attended the first symposium, which was broadcast live over the Internet from the FAS home page.

Administrators continued to gather opinions about the review at home and overseas.

Summers and Kirby have kept alumni up to date about the review’s progress.

From September to March of this year, Kirby held 18 “roadshow” events for alumni, where either Gross, one of the steering committee co-chairs or Kirby himself led round table discussions about the review. The tour landed in twelve cities, including New York, Chicago and Hong Kong.

And while pitching the review outside Cambridge, the deans set to work at winning over their colleagues.

When the idea of the review was first introduced in Faculty meetings, professors were excited about the opportunity to shape the College’s academic future.

An unusually high number of professors spoke up during a November meeting, many of them emphasizing the review’s significance.

“This is our moment, and I hope we will not shrink from it,” said Plummer Professor of Christian Morals Peter J. Gomes at the time.

At the following month’s meeting, Gutman Professor of Latin American Affairs John H. Coatsworth encouraged his colleagues to keep an open mind throughout the review process. “We will have missed a huge opportunity if all we do is tinker,” he said. “We don’t get to do this that often.”

After spending the fall brainstorming ideas, each working group contributed to an interim report which was discussed at a Dec. 16 Faculty meeting.

The report avoided specific recommendations, instead reiterating six broad goals of internationalization, scientific literacy, interdisciplinary study, faculty-student interaction, increased student research options and expanded undergraduate work with other University schools.

Despite this update, some professors said they felt dissatisfied with the progress and presentation.

“No big theme emerged,” said Professor of Government Harvey C. Mansfield ’53 afterwards. “I couldn’t tell what the Faculty thought was wrong with our present curriculum.”

In spite of the report’s vague tone, administrators remained optimistic that a fully formed set of recommendations would be completed by the end of this academic year—a goal that now appears to be within reach.

“We knew what we were putting out,” says Wolcowitz of the interim reports. “That’s where we were at that point, even if it wasn’t specific.”

LEFT IN THE DARK

Wolcowitz now anticipates that his report will facilitate and focus academic discussion among faculty, students and administrators.

Such a shift is likely to be a welcome development in a review that some have criticized for neglecting the Harvard community in its decision-making process.

“I don’t think any of my colleagues have any clue what’s going on,” says Professor Richard G. Heck. “There’s been some faculty presentations but not a lot. I think people are pretty clueless.”

Professor of the History of Science Everett I. Mendelsohn says that most of his information about the workings of the review has come from informal sources, like friends on the committee and various departmental rumors.

Lecturer on the Study of Religion Brian C.W. Palmer ’86 says that he also feels that the review ought to have organized differently.

“It has been a much more controlled process, and that’s a problem,” he says. “I would have loved to see more leakage—more of the ideas coming out and being put up there so people could discuss them,” he says. “If we knew someone on the committee they might tell us, but otherwise we wouldn’t hear about it. Committees would come to the faculty but they gave very general statements.”

Mendelsohn says he fears that waiting too long to involve faculty may weaken the review.

“Part of the difficulty is if you come into the procedure too late, you have to overcome a barrier before you can get into the discussion,” he says. “Once a committee has come up with a series of recommendations, there’s not an awful lot of room left for people who want to look at that differently. You can either vote something down, but that’s costly all around or you shrug and you say ‘isn’t that too bad.’”

WAITING PATIENTLY

Wolcowitz says that the review has remained quiet because the discussions have been so purposefully inconclusive.

“We’ve been trying to keep the working groups focused, to think about ideas and not have the community respond to half baked ideas that haven’t been fully formed,” he says.

And not all faculty are disturbed by their lack of participation, with many waiting to join the open discussion that Wolcowitz has promised will dominate next academic year.

Professor of Psychology David M. Wegner says he has no complaints about the review’s tight-lipped policy.

“I think that all of us have been consulted, but it’s more of a matter of how much of our own time we want to commit,” he says. “I’m aware of what’s been going on.”

Although no one has come to his office to ask him what he thinks, Wegner says, he has been satisfied with the level of consultation.

And while Dean of the Humanities Maria M. Tatar argues that having more details would make discussion easier, she says she does not feel uninformed about the review.

“I think there’s a general sense that we’re eager to get the committee’s reports, which I gather are provisional,” she says. “We’re moving into the more exciting phase of curricular planning.”

STUDENTS WEIGH IN

And as the review looks towards its next phase, students are mobilizing to make sure their voice is heard.

The Undergraduate Council (UC) has been active from the start.

Since Kirby’s introductory letter, the UC has pushed for student involvement at every level of the review.

Last year’s UC President Rohit Chopra ’04 struck a deal with the Office for Undergraduate Education that gave the UC a hand in the selection of the student committee members.

From the 100 students who applied for the positions, the UC narrowed the pool to a short list from which Gross chose eight representatives—two for each of the working groups.

But UC President Matthew W. Mahan ’05 says he is still somewhat frustrated by the system.

“I went into it very idealistically, and I thought it was going to be this big representative thing,” Mahan says. “We’re talking about eight people though, spread out over four committees representing 6600 people. Even in numbers there’s no way they can be representative.”

Students on the committees also say that at first their role was ambiguous.

“There’s a little bit of a dichotomy,” says Joseph K. Green ’05, who serves on the group examining pedagogy. “On the one hand we are representatives of the student body, but we’re also just some students who are on the committee. The eight students who are on these committees are not a slice of Harvard—we are people who interested in this stuff.”

And although no students serve on the general steering committee—the “traffic cop” which Mahan says makes all the final decisions—members seem to have found their place alongside the professors.

“I’ve felt treated as a colleague,” says Green. “[Faculty] held my opinion in just as high regard as theirs. There were some areas where we disagreed, and they didn’t just ignore my opinions—they made sure that we were on the same page.”

“It’s been really great working with the faculty,” says Victoria L. Sprow ’06, who serves on the Working Group on Students’ Overall Academic Experience. “We’ve gotten really comfortable with each other, and we can be honest about our opinions. In general it’s good to have those different perspectives because a lot of the time they’re in opposition—but everybody recognizes that what we’re doing is mostly for the students.”

FULL STEAM AHEAD

And more and more students not on committees have begun to get involved.

A panel held by administrators in Emerson Hall last October climaxed with representatives from the Harvard Political Union dispersing into House common rooms with pizza boxes in hand to gather input from students watching the Red Sox-Yankees game.

This type of grassroots activity resumed last month, when Gregory M. Schmidt ’06 and his roommates invited their friends to their room for an informational meeting with Green and Mahan.

The pair fielded questions from those in attendance and brainstormed ways to get more undergraduates educated about the review.

“A lot of students are somewhat apathetic about the process because they don’t really see it affecting them,” Mahan says. “It’s not that students don’t care, but they’re busy and they need to be shown why the review is relevant.”

Schmidt, who has not attended any of the administration’s informational meetings, says he organized the meeting because he did not know anything about the review, but was interested in getting involved.

“I’m as much as part of the problem as I am a part of the solution,” he says.

He asked Green to help with the meeting, and after about 25 phone calls and 10 e-mails, the duo had rounded up a sizeable crowd in Schmidt’s Eliot House dorm room.

Schmidt was satisfied with the evening’s results.

“A lot of people who came who were just doing it for food or as a favor to me came out of it saying ‘I didn’t think this mattered before, but this really is something that’s important and something that could effect the Harvard experience,’” says Green. “They’re more willing to help out with the process now.”

Schmidt, who worked on the Howard Dean campaign this summer, says he hopes that more such meetings will occur all over campus as students become more interested in the review.

“Hopefully the people who came will go and make their own gatherings,” he says. “We’d like to get sort of a ripple effect, and to get more people discussing this.”

Green says the next step will be to design a survey with Mahan and the other seven student committee members that will be released to all undergraduates this month.

Mahan says that the survey will cover a lot of ground, supplementing the data collected at the end of last year in the senior and freshman surveys, and will be submitted to the deans for consideration.

FILLING THE VOID

With concrete proposals on the table, the current chapter of the curricular review comes to a close, and it remains unclear exactly what shape next year’s open forum discussions will take.

Two of the student committee members will graduate, several committee members are going on leave next fall, and this year’s working groups will disband before the summer—leaving a void at the review’s core that will have to be somehow filled.

As soon as those crucial organizational decisions are made, the review can enter a new phase of concrete legislation that will be put to a faculty vote.

Every group in the University community—including faculty, students and alumni—looks ready to elbow its way into the discussion next year, and as the floor is opened before Kirby, Gross and Wolcowitz, a truly definitive, and potentially revolutionary curriculum may emerge at Harvard before too long.

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