Council Mulls Over Report

In its first opportunity to comment on the College’s curricular review, the Faculty Council yesterday discussed the broad themes and directions proposed in a report released Monday but did not tackle the details of implementing a new curriculum.

Baird Professor of Science Gary J. Feldman, who sat on the review’s Working Group on Pedagogy, said the report is comprehensive and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) will need to take time to decide how to implement its recommendations.

“The discussion was on a high and general level,” Feldman said. “I don’t think we came to any conclusions.”

Professor of the History of Science Everett I. Mendelsohn said that the broad recommendations were generally accepted by the Council members.

“There’s just not an awful lot in there that has contention in it,” Mendelsohn said.

Mendelsohn added yesterday that the report fell short of proposing a vision comparable to the ideological foundation that underpinned the curricular review undertaken at the end of World War II.

“One [principle] is the notion that we want to be able to solve problems,” Mendelsohn said. “There’s some of that there, although it doesn’t come across as a great vision.”

Feldman said that the Faculty will need time to decide on specifics left ambiguous in the report, including how the suggestions for general education will be implemented.

“There are some blanks to be filled in,” Feldman said. “What are the areas [in which] you want to have the general education [required]?”

The report issued Monday recommends the creation of a set of classes to be known as the Harvard College Courses, which will be broad-based survey courses in the various fields chosen for general education.

Mendelsohn said that the generic name for the new courses was mocked at yesterday’s meeting, “Someone chided [the review] for calling some of the courses ‘Harvard College Courses,’” he said.

Professor of Greek and Latin Richard F. Thomas said that the Council also discussed the distribution option that is recommended as one way to fulfill the general education requirement.

“Certainly there was a sense that it wouldn’t be the whole curriculum that [would] be available,” Thomas said. “I think we really just began to explore the obvious questions as we work toward actually creating some version of the curriculum that the report suggests,” he added in an e-mail.

The Council also discussed the recommendation that all students be expected to study abroad be expanded, Thomas said.

“We began, without getting into details, to ask ourselves [if] study abroad [is] desirable for must students, for all students [or] for some student,” he said.

“There’s a definite sense, I think, that greater access to study abroad...is very much to be desired.”

Mendelsohn said yesterday that the report’s recommendation that student-faculty contact be expanded is an essential—but challenging—part of a liberal education.

“We are committed to giving a liberal education,” he said. “The question is how do we operationalize it.”

In separate business, the Council also heard a report from the Standing Committee on the Status of Women about the Faculty’s progress in hiring more women as professors.

Feldman said committee members proposed that the position of a dean for affirmative action be reinstated to help the new divisional deans ensure that faculty searches include women as candidates.

“I think the general feeling was that one should see how the divisional deans handle this and whatever works best we should go with,” Feldman said. “It’s not an issue that is based on any particular principle but on what works best.”

Feldman said that the Council did not reach any conclusion in its discussions.

—Staff writer Joshua D. Gottlieb can be reached at jdgottl@fas.harvard.edu.