After Vote, Faculty Faces a Daunting Transition

The Gen Ed legislation’s passage comes as a long-anticipated bookend to the four-year-long effort to replace the Core. But the work of implementing the new curriculum is just beginning, and many questions remain unanswered as the Faculty gears up for its biggest curricular transition in a generation.

The approved legislation provides a partial timeline for the implementation of the new program. The committee that administers the Core is slated to be dissolved at the end of the coming academic year—but the legislation does not spell out when the Core itself will cease to exist.

Dean of the College Benedict H. Gross ’71 said after yesterday’s meeting that undergraduates studying at Harvard during the transition period, excluding freshmen who enter the College after new requirements have been put in place, will be able to finish under either of the curricular programs. Thus, all current undergraduates will be able to graduate under the current Core requirements.

Interim Dean of the Faculty David Pilbeam has already begun soliciting names of professors to serve on the Standing Committee on General Education, which will oversee the development of a full menu of courses for the new curriculum. Pilbeam said he plans to set up the committee before July 1, when he will be replaced by a successor who has yet to be named.

“The standing committee has to be large enough to be reasonably representative, but small enough to be nimble,” Pilbeam said in an interview after yesterday’s meeting. He added that he hoped to include in the committee at least one professor who opposed the proposal in yesterday’s 168 to 14 vote.

After the 2007-2008 school year, the general education committee will assume the responsibilities of the Standing Committee on the Core Program—but the Core itself, with all of its requirements, may remain in place for several years more as the academic and administrative details of the new curriculum are fleshed out.

A LEARNING CURVE

According to Weary Professor of German and Comparative Literature Judith L. Ryan, who served on the three-member group that drafted the legislation based on a final report released in February, there will be a transition period of “a couple years at a minimum” in which both Core and general education classes are offered.

“Once we have a set of general education courses ready to run—and that wouldn’t have to be a complete set—at that point, incoming freshmen would be asked to take general education courses,” Ryan said. “But there might be Core Curriculum courses held over.”

Professors say they expect to face a learning curve as they adjust to the new curriculum.

“I think it’s a mistake to expect that every detail will be worked out and that one can design a program with perfect foresight,” said science historian Peter L. Galison, the Pellegrino university professor. “There will be modifications that will be introduced and that’s fine and good.”

Charles S. Maier, the Saltonstall professor of history, said implementation will be a “long-term effort” and not “a quick administrative fix.”

“Those of us who taught actively in the Core and enjoy teaching to non-concentrators will still have to create new sorts of courses with different objects from what the Core required,” Maier wrote in an e-mail from Paris, where he is teaching for a month. “This will take some time.”

But according to Harry R. Lewis ’68, the McKay professor of computer science and former dean of the College, the Faculty is taking a risk by leaving the details of the new curriculum to be worked out by a future committee.

“We are going to vote this legislation first and then assign to a committee the job of seeing whether it makes sense in the context of the rest of the curriculum,” he said at yesterday’s meeting. “It should not be the job of an implementation committee to do the simple arithmetic that should precede the vote.”

The gap between approval and implementation after the last curricular review was about one year. The Faculty endorsed the Core Curriculum in spring 1978, and the new program took effect for freshmen entering in fall 1979.

Professor of the History of Science Everett I. Mendelsohn, who has taught at Harvard since the 1960s, recalled a two-year transition period in which both general education and Core courses were offered. He said the details of the Core’s implementation were also left to a committee.

In an interview before yesterday’s meeting, Mendelsohn said that professors were ready to move on from a four-year debate marked, at times, by “retreat and sheer exhaustion.”

“I think that the Faculty is ready to see something approved,” Mendelsohn said. “My sense is that there is enough general enthusiasm about the new program, and enough confidence that the committee appointed will be qualified to work out the details.”

—Staff writer Alexandra Hiatt can be reached at ahiatt@fas.harvard.edu.