Retailoring the Curriculum

For observers of Harvard’s three-year-old curricular review, it’s déjà vu.

In circumstances strikingly similar to those in which the “Gang of Five” —a group of academics who revised the recommendations of the Committee on General Education last summer—was formed, Dean of the Faculty William C. Kirby has selected six professors to retailor a set of general education proposals that have generated little enthusiasm among faculty members.

It is one of the last official acts of the deanship for Kirby, who was charged with spearheading the curricular review after taking office in 2002.

One year after the Committee on General Education released its report on the future of general education at Harvard, not a single recommendation has been voted upon by the Faculty.

The current proposal requires that students take three courses in each of three areas—Arts and Humanities, Study of Societies, and Science and Technology—and proposes the creation of optional interdisciplinary general education courses that many faculty members say have yet to be clearly defined.

The new summer committee will be “recasting” some of the proposals currently on the table, according to Bass Professor of English and American Literature and Language Louis Menand, a member of the Gang of Five and a co-chair of this summer’s committee.

“Bill wants to have a group of faculty, some involved on the old general education committee, some not, to meet for some length of time to try to look over the proposals in light of what faculty have said and to see what might be done in way of shaping something that might be brought up for vote in the fall,” says Menand, who will be co-chairing the group with Professor of Philosophy Alison Simmons, also a former Gang of Five member.

According to Secretary of the Faculty David B. Fithian, the other members of the committee are Lindsley Professor of Psychology Stephen M. Kosslyn, Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology David R. Liu ’94, Ford Professor of Human Evolution David Pilbeam, and Professor of Sociology Mary C. Waters.

The committee’s charge, Menand says, is “a little vague.”

That is nothing new for the three-year-old review of general education, which has been criticized for a lack of vision at every step.

“I think that people are beginning to realize that we’re so close to embarrassing ourselves,” says Peter K. Bol, the co-chair of the preliminary committee that first generated ideas for general education in 2004.

Some professors say the review’s vision will emerge from the existing proposals once the full Faculty discusses them in depth. Others say they want to send the proposals back to the drawing board in order to produce a report that will redefine undergraduate education for the 21st century.

As it stands, Harvard’s curricular review “puts us in line with many peer institutions, but it doesn’t really show the capacity of our faculty and our students to rethink how best to learn,” Professor of History and Science Allan M. Brandt says.

STARTING WITH THE SYLLABUS

Before University administrators can articulate the curricular review’s vision for general education, professors must decide what sort of vision they are seeking.

Baird Professor of Science Gary J. Feldman says that the faculty first needs to agree on general education principles.

“If we define our purposes well and we design an innovative and exciting curriculum that matches them—maybe not a curriculum but a set of requirements and offerings—we can sell that. We should start with the educational values we want and then let the administrators take that and sell it,” he says.

Bol says the purpose of general education is to present students with a coherent plan of study that has clear importance.

“Structure isn’t vision,” Bol says. “Saying that we need to have interdisciplinary integrative courses isn’t a vision. Say that we need to create integrated courses in a series of fields, and these are the fields, and this is how the fields related to each other, and this is what we promise the students as the reward for doing this—that is a vision.”

Creating integrative, interdisciplinary general education courses could be a step in the right direction for general education—but the committee did not define exactly what these courses would be like, professors say.

But the lack of clarity about the general education courses in the committee’s report was the result of deep disagreement among committee members about the nature of the courses, says Assistant Dean of the College Stephanie H. Kenen, who sat in on the meetings of the Gang of Five this summer.

Some members thought the general education courses should emphasize applying foundational texts to contemporary problems, Kenen says, while others thought the courses should focus solely on the classic works and fundamental questions themselves.

Since the committee was unable to reconcile these two concepts of general education, they ended up “trying to come to something nobody would strongly object to as opposed to something everybody would be excited about,” Kenen says.

Brandt says he envisions multi-disciplinary general education courses that would be problem-oriented. A course on poverty, for example, might bring together law, government, economics, anthropology, and literature professors who would approach the problem from different angles.

Next year, several new humanities courses will be offered under the general education section of the course catalog, including a course on literary odysseys and a course on existentialism in film and literature.

But Kenen says that although the creation of these courses was stimulated by the general education discussion, they may not necessarily provide the pattern for what general education courses will look like.

REVIEW IN PREVIEW

And already, several of the participants in that discussion admit to feeling little ownership over their proposals.

“Frankly, I wouldn’t shed any tears if it didn’t pass,” Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology Steven Pinker told The Crimson this spring.

“It appears to me that we really have to start this general education from the start again,” Feldman says. “The two committees that met did not do an adequate job.”

Despite some dissatisfaction among faculty members, though, some professors are calling for closure.

“After all the work that’s gone through already, I find it difficult to believe we could start all over again,” Pearson Professor of Philosophy Warren D. Goldfarb ’69 says.

“I think there’s a sense that we should bring this to a close. We should be able as a faculty to make a decision,” says Kemper ’41 Professor of American History James T. Kloppenberg.

Committee members say they expect faculty members to vote on some version of the proposals this fall, after they have been refined by the committee that will meet over the summer.

“The basic structure of the proposals will remain, but the details are up in the air,” Saltonstall Professor of History Charles S. Maier ’60 says.

Maier, a former Gang of Five member, will not be part of this summer’s committee.

CRISIS AT THE HELM

This spring, the University’s leadership crisis halted discussion on the general education proposals. Though discussion of the recommendations was on the agenda for a number of meetings this semester, “the faculty meetings were taken up with these resignations,” Menand says.

“People are so busy that conversations happen in bits and pieces, and people don’t feel they’re deciding as a faculty body as a whole,” Simmons says.

Even before this spring, Committee on General Education meetings were one of the primary sites where the administration’s conflict played out, according to one committee member, who adds that the committee could not do its best intellectual work in such an environment.

“It was a mess,” the committee member says. “That almost surely had an impact on our ability to deal with the issues at hand. Most people on the committee considered resigning, it was so unpleasant.”

And History department chair Andrew D. Gordon ’74 says that Summers and Kirby “couldn’t work together effectively” to promote the review.

“They couldn’t speak together with one enthusiastic voice about what to put forward,” he says.

Some involved with the Committee on General Education say Summers, who was a member of the committee until the spring of 2005, used a heavy-handed approach that alienated other participants.

“The outgoing president wanted things done in a particular way. He wanted something he could sell,” says one member of the committee who asked to remain anonymous.

Within the Committee on General Education, the member says, Summers’ participation hindered the members’ ability to produce the report they wanted.

“We [on the committee] were either being pushed to make decisions or being struck down when we did make decisions,” the committee member says.

Menand says that, contrary to faculty perception, the administration did not impose its views on the committee.

But, he says, “To the extent that there was sentiment on the faculty that was skeptical of President Summers, that tended to reflect people’s views of the curricular review as well.”

Full faculty discussion of the recommendations next fall, many faculty members say, will allow faculty to feel ownership of the proposals, and may finally lead to their approval.

LOOKING BOK AND AHEAD

When then-Dean of the Faculty Henry Rosovsky sent the initial Core Curriculum report to professors in 1978, The New York Times declared on its front page, “Like the Red Book a generation ago, the report released this week is likely to have widespread influence throughout American higher education.”

But if the faculty passes the current review without major revisions, its influence is unlikely to extend much beyond Harvard Yard.

“It’s not going to put Harvard on the front page of The New York Times,” Weary Professor of German and Comparative Literature Judith L. Ryan says.

But come July 1, the president who helped Harvard usher through its last curricular review will once again be at the University’s helm.

Some faculty members say they hope that Incoming Interim President Derek C. Bok’s presence will allow for a substantial reevaluation of Harvard’s general education. Bok recently analyzed data on undergraduate education in his book, “Our Underachieving Colleges: A Candid Look at How Much Students Learn and Why They Should Be Learning More.”

In addition to offering input on the details of the review, professors say Bok and Incoming Interim Faculty dean Jeremy R. Knowles will be able to use their clout to broadcast the review’s message.

The report “needs use of the bully pulpit of the president and dean to articulate not just for the faculty but for the College and for people outside of Harvard what the [general education] principles are all about,” Menand says.

Gordon says he agrees that Bok and Knowles’s involvement could be significant.

“The ability of Derek Bok and Jeremy Knowles to work together effectively and articulate a vision effectively will be crucial,” Gordon says.

But Bok writes that he will not impose his own ideas about general education on Harvard’s faculty.

“It is up to the committee to decide what aspects of the [Report on General Education] to discuss and what aspects to change,” he writes in an e-mail.

‘GRANDIOSE THINKING’

The faculty passed two of the curricular review’s recommendations, a delay in concentration choice timing and the creation of secondary fields, akin to minors, this spring. General education is one of the last pieces of the review yet to come up for a full faculty vote, though discussion of it has been on the agenda at several of this spring’s faculty meetings.

“The longer the process runs, the higher the expectations for some breakthrough innovation in curricular structure or approaches to learning...There’s a danger that something that stays relatively close to the existing organization will be seen as a kind of wishy-washy copout,” Gordon says. But, he adds, “That’s not a reason not to do it if it makes sense.”

Jayne Professor of Government and Professor of African and African American Studies Jennifer L. Hochschild says faculty and students have high expectations for curricular review.

“We look to ourselves, the students look to us as faculty, for something more than just providing an opportunity for people to educate each other. There should be something more powerfully motivating and inspiring in the education process,” she says.

And Harvard’s position in higher education puts pressure on the University to craft a general education program that is both practical for students and inspiring, Gordon says.

“Because it’s Harvard, people have an inflated sense of what they do. It’s got to make sense of our students, but it also has to send a message to the world,” he says.

“We sometimes get trapped by that kind of grandiose thinking.”

—Staff writer Lois E. Beckett can be reached at lbeckett@fas.harvard.edu.

—Staff writer Johannah S. Cornblatt can be reached at jcornbl@fas.harvard.edu.