Mixed Reviews

Munching on Noch’s pizza at a Dunster House study break in early March, University President Lawrence H. Summers prophesied that the current Harvard College curricular review would be “the most comprehensive review of Harvard’s curriculum in a century.”

But Summers may have bitten off more than the administrators he charged with leading the review can chew.

After a year’s work by administrators and a select contingent of faculty and students, the review has produced a 67-page document, 57 recommendations, four new committees—and more than a plateful of criticisms.

Many professors complain that the rushed, oblique process prevented adequate discussion from taking place, leaving their voices unheard or, at best, under-represented in the final report, issued this April.

Faculty say the report’s primary problem lies in its lack of a guiding principle that informs all of the recommendations. But one of the primary authors of the report, Associate Dean of the College Jeffrey Wolcowitz, says that a more clearly defined “guiding philosophy will emerge” in the coming year.

The recommendations call for the Core to be replaced by a set of distributional requirements and new survey classes, a one-semester delay in the concentration choice deadline, increased emphasis on the sciences and international experiences, as well as a possible switch to a Yale-style housing system that would assign first-years to an upperclass House before entering the College.

But without a driving thesis to unite the disparate recommendations and with the report’s release mired in controversy surrounding the review process, the administration has thus far failed to garner much faculty support—a necessary ingredient to any successful overhaul of undergraduate education.

Administrators say they plan to bring many of the proposals before faculty for debate next year, though some changes are not contingent on faculty approval.

“It’s [the College administration’s] hope that there will be agreement within the faculty next year,” Summers said at the Dunster study break.

But much work remains if the faculty is to swallow this review, especially if faculty perceive this review as a top-down effort concentrated in the hands of administrators, including Summers, who several current administrators say was chomping at the bit to get his fingers—but not his fingerprints—on the review.

“I’m a little worried at the moment that it will not be debated in the open-spirited manner it deserves,” says former Dean of Undergraduate Education William M. Todd III, who says he nonetheless agrees with most of the report’s recommendations. “That is not a problem of content, but more in terms of the direction in which the community is headed...Part of it is people’s fear of where Harvard is going under President Summers.”

A MATTER OF PRINCIPLE

Harvard’s last two curricular reviews, in the 1940s and 1970s, each pioneered tenets of undergraduate education that came to dominate Harvard and the rest of the nation. The 1945 review under then-University President James B. Conant ’14 essentially invented the idea of general education; its report, the “Redbook,” sold 40,000 copies in a few years. Former Dean of the Faculty Henry A. Rosovsky’s 1979 review invented the Core and a system of “approaches to knowledge” that became popular nationwide.

This April’s report, by contrast, has been widely critiqued by faculty for its lack of a guiding principle—something which Wolcowitz, author of the report, freely admits.

“The report did not have a guiding philosophy of general education on the order of ‘general education in a free society’ in 1945, or even the Core’s ‘approaches to knowledge,’” Wolcowitz writes in an e-mail. “I expected a clearer guiding philosophy to emerge as requirement areas get defined.”

But critics, like Baird Professor of Science Gary J. Feldman, say efforts to design an undergraduate education are futile without first establishing what the College is trying to design.

“It looked to me that the thing was done somewhat backwards, with the form done without the rationale behind it,” says Feldman, who served on the review’s pedagogy working group. “The [general education] committee came up with a general form but no specifics...They may say they have a perfect rationale but I haven’t seen it yet.”

Feldman says he worries the review may even look backwards rather than forwards, arguing it has an “alarming resemblance to the general education requirements” of two generations ago, with its proposal to replace the Core with a combination of departmental distribution requirements and the so-called Harvard College Courses, a set of as-yet-undefined broad interdisciplinary survey courses. This proposal somewhat resembles the distributional requirement system established in the 1940s, which faced widespread faculty and student dissatisfaction by the time of Rosovsky’s 1970s review that created the Core as a replacement. According to critics at the time, the flexibility of the 1940s system led to diluted courses lacking intellectual rigor and left the faculty uninspired and lackadaisical about teaching them.

Still, Wolcowitz dismisses fears about the process’s apparent lack of vision.

“I was personally less troubled than some others by the fact that we didn’t have an overarching philosophy of general education, believing that the most important goal is to ensure that students are broadly educated in a wide range of fields and do not overspecialize,” Wolcowitz says.

But critics charge that the lack of a guiding vision in this year’s review prevented a critical mass of faculty from involving themselves, leaving professors on the sidelines as the administration attempts to revolutionize undergraduate education.

“I think that the entire process has lacked an underlying vision,” says Baird Professor of History Mark A. Kishlansky. “This is a complicated curricular change because nobody is behind it...That means there’s not a cohort of faculty willing to make sacrifices.”

Moreover, the administration has disproportionately solicited the viewpoints of certain professors, exacerbating the sense of alienation among much of the faculty. The review committees, for instance, contained a substantial contingent of younger faculty, something Dean of the College Benedict H. Gross ’71 says was done “deliberately.”

“We wanted to hear some new voices on the faculty…that were coming from other institutions and had new ideas,” says Gross, who co-chaired the review. “Obviously people who have been here for a while will make their voices heard, but we wanted to get others involved in the decision.”

A NOT-SO-WELL-OILED MACHINE

If faculty outside the review felt estranged from the process, even some of the 40-odd members of the working groups that led the review found themselves mystified by portions of the final report.

Although the subcommittees met biweekly throughout the year and generated internal written reports, the recommendations of the final public report required only a vote by steering committee members—resulting in several significant discrepancies between working group proposals and the suggestions in the final report.

One of the final report’s most controversial recommendations, a 12-course cap on concentration requirements that has rankled many in the sciences, was not recommended in the Working Group of Concentrations’ final written report, obtained by The Crimson. The committee members did not learn about the change until the draft report was sent to them four days before the final report’s public release.

“We did not discuss the suggestion that the number of courses in a concentration be limited although such a recommendation found its way into the report,” says Professor of Latin Kathleen M. Coleman, who served on the concentration subcommittee and says several of the final recommendations—including that one—“do not mesh with the spirit of our discussions.”

Seven of the 14 concentration-related recommendations that ended up in the final report did not originate in the subcommittee, according to Coleman. The final report significantly expands on concentration advising and includes a recommendation to recertify all concentrations—both absent from the subcommittee’s final report.

Another major proposal—a recommendation that the College consider assigning first-years to upperclass Houses the summer before they enter the College instead of the blocking system at the end of the first year—came from administrators and was not included in any subcommittees’ recommendation, according to committee member Joseph K. Green ’05.

“We were all sort of blindsided by it,” he says.

Feldman says one of his subcommittee’s chief recommendations, the development of a pedagogical institute to research and improve teaching at Harvard, was cut from the final report, while the group’s recommendation for a January term was “substantially modified.”

In fact, Wolcowitz began writing the final report before all the working groups had submitted their written recommendations, but Gross says time constraints made this an inevitability.

“It would have been impossible to wait for all the final documents before we started writing,” says Gross.

Gross attributes the changes to the difficulties inherent in combining the work of a large number of people.

“Whenever you combine the work of 50 to 60 people, there’s going to be some bending,” he says. “All of it found its way into Jeff Wolcowitz’s head and he wrote it down.”

Green says that while working group members were told they would see a draft of the review at least one week before the report was to be made public, they were only e-mailed a draft the Thursday night before the report was released on Monday, April 26. Moreover, Green says, the secrecy of the review process prevented him and the other student members from “vet[ting] individual ideas before the student body before Wolcowitz’s final report.”

“It’s got to be somewhat strategic,” he says. “The effect was to make us impotent.”

A Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) administrator who worked on the review says they regret not giving the working groups more time to amend the draft before finalizing it.

“The big mistake we made was not giving reports to the working groups earlier,” the FAS administrator says. “Now it all looks kind of conspiratorial.”

The administrator adds that the authors of the final report could not use all the working groups’ materials in the final draft because of their informal styles—often in casual e-mail and bullet-point forms—and not necessarily because the concepts were different. And in the rush to the finish line, some recommendations were omitted and others added without first consulting the working groups.

“We’re doing all this at the last hour,” the FAS administrator says, “so it’s like you’re turning in a paper at the last minute, and you want it to be good, so you’re changing everything at the last minute.”

“I’m not surprised that people feel disenfranchised,” the administrator adds. “Frankly, we moved too fast.”

All this skepticism surrounding the integrity of the process means that many faculty wonder from where the report’s impetus stems.

“It’s not a movement that came from within the faculty,” Kishlansky says.

ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN

Controversy has surrounded one noteworthy figure whose directives certainly provided an impetus for the report—President Summers.

Many of the broad themes for liberal education stressed in the report’s introduction—including internationalization and the sciences—were first outlined by Summers in a Commencement address last year. Summers told The Crimson last month that he was “pleased that many of the things that I have thought of as particularly important, [such as] broadening the expectation of science for non-scientists, internationalization, increasing faculty-student contact, having courses that survey broad[ly], having knowledge that represents knowing rather than ways of knowing, the emphasis and recognition of the importance of oral as well as written expression, the importance of interdisciplinary approaches...are addressed in one way or another in the review.”

But Summers may have more than just his philosophical imprint on the report—his red-ink may lie between the report’s lines.

One of his Mass. Hall aides, Associate Vice President for Higher Education Policy Clayton Spencer, and Summers himself attended some steering committee meetings, the FAS administrator says, adding that “Clayton saw everything.” Summers says he gave Spencer his suggestions for the report. That steering committee was composed of the three leaders of the review—Gross, Wolcowitz and Dean of the Faculty William C. Kirby—the eight co-chairs of the working groups and Carol J. Thompson, an administrator at the Kennedy School of Government who used to serve as an FAS associate dean.

In a May interview, Summers told The Crimson that he saw a draft of the report on which he “made suggestions.”

“I didn’t edit,” he added. “I don’t know the details of the internal processes of the authors’ report.”

But another administrator close to the process says Summers was involved “a lot—either direct or indirect.” Summers’ staff, including Spencer, were “intimately involved” in the editing process, the administrator says, “even rewriting parts of the report.”

And as the deadline of the report approached, the administrator says, Summers began to worry about how the report would turn out.

“He seemed to pull back at one point maybe because he didn’t think it was coming out the way he wanted, and didn’t want to be identified with it,” the administrator says.

University Hall administrators deny that Summers had a heavy hand in the writing and constructing of the report. Kirby insists that Summers “did not play any role in the editing of the report.” Wolcowitz characterizes Summers’ edits of the draft as “not a major reshaping” of the document.

Sources say the tension between Mass. Hall and University Hall was resolved after the review received—to the surprise of Summers and his colleagues—positive press in the Boston Globe and The New York Times.

“A lot of people in Mass. Hall seemed to be surprised by how positive the coverage was,” the administrator familiar with the process says. “They were pleased but a bit puzzled about why the outside press was so favorable. The truth is that the proposal does not have any overall vision or bold new conception.”

The FAS administrator involved with the review agrees that Mass. Hall administrators were not very enthusiastic with the review until they read the coverage it received in national newspapers.

“People in Mass. Hall were shocked by the positive press...I don’t think they had much faith in what we were doing,” the administrator says. “They were happily surprised...There is a lot of stealing credit going on right now.”

THE BEGINNING OF THE END

With the curricular review’s progress thus far mired with dissension about the process used to generate the recommendations, the University Hall administrators behind the report face an uphill battle as the review enters a year of substantive debate about which recommendations to implement and how to do so.

Some faculty say their lack of participation in the process thus far means they are unenergetic just when their enthusiasm is most needed.

“It’s going to be interesting to find out where that energy is going to come from, because that is going to be necessary,” Kishlansky says.

While faculty prepare to fight over the recently released recommendations of this year’s report, Derek C. Bok, who was University president during the 1979 review, says his review’s first report came after a year of widespread debate and incorporated and reconciled dissenting viewpoints.

In contrast to last April’s report, which bills itself as a set of preliminary recommendations to direct next year’s discussion, the first significant report released to the Faculty in 1978 already contained concrete, fleshed out ideas.

“By the time we got to the final discussions, a lot of differences had been sort of hammered out,” Bok says. “What finally came before the faculty really reflected a hammering out of many of those differences.”

Still, it is unclear to what extent the faculty will need to hammer out some of these recommendations. Though Gross is adamant that faculty will be consulted to some extent on all aspects, Feldman says the administration holds almost complete control over the fate of the review’s proposals.

“To the extent that Dean Kirby agrees with these recommendations, he’ll just implement them,” Feldman says.

Administrators have left it unclear which of the 57 recommendations will be up for Faculty vote and which will be implemented by the administration. Only matters that change academic requirements or the transcript require a Faculty vote, Wolcowitz says.

Lawrence Buell, English department chair and former dean of undergraduate education, says the administration should err on the side of faculty participation on gray areas for which a Faculty vote may or may not be required.

But faculty say administrators have not done much to explain how the remainder of the review will proceed. Administrators plan to form four new working groups—charged with discussing the general education requirement, the Expository Writing program, science education and the proposed changes to the House system—and flesh out other proposals in already existent Faculty committees, though they have not presented specifics on how this process will work.

In terms of a broader discussion on undergraduate education, Feldman notes that next year’s Faculty meetings will provide a maximum of 14 hours of curricular review discussion unless Gross schedules alternative meetings.

“There is some concern on my part that it’s going to be difficult to get everything into the time it is allotted next year,” Feldman says.

—Staff writer William C. Marra can be reached at wmarra@fas.harvard.edu

—Staff writer Lauren A. E. Schuker can be reached at schuker@fas.harvard.edu.