Grad Students To Help Design Gen Ed Courses

Chair of the General Education Standing Committee Jay M. Harris presented an update on curricular reform at yesterday’s meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS), highlighting a new strategy for course development that will use graduate seminars as vehicles for planning future undergraduate courses.

According to Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dean Allan M. Brandt, six or seven of these course=planning seminars will be in place in the fall, including one on international human rights taught by African studies professor Caroline M. Elkins.

Brandt said that the seminars would help the professors refine new Gen Ed courses, and said a potential assignment for graduate student participants might be answering the question “what are the questions you would ask on a midterm?”

The seminars will also cultivate future assistants for the professors involved, Harris said.

“It is of course the hope that those graduate students who take the graduate seminar will be the [teaching fellows] when the course is offered in the following year,” he said. “Then there will be courses in General Education with well-trained TFs who have a certain sense of expertise and a certain sense of ownership in those courses.”

Harris also reaffirmed that the new Gen Ed curriculum would be fully in place by fall 2009, with a “robust” slate of courses ready for the Class of 2013.

GOOGLE ANALYTICS

Before wrapping up his segment of the General Education presentation, Harris revealed a disconcerting fact about the program’s Web site.

“I have unfortunately found recently that if you Google things like ‘Harvard General Education,’ we have not yet risen to the top of the Google list,” he said.

He then proffered a few potential solutions, including an entreaty to his fellow faculty members.

“I’m told you can pay for that service,” he said of moving up the Google rankings, before adding that he had heard links were also a factor in a site’s position among the Google search results.

“If any department want to put us on their Web page to help us...” Harris offered.

AT LAST

After failing to draw the numbers necessary to conduct official votes at almost a third of its meetings in the past four years, the Faculty considered lowering its quorum standards for attendance at its meeting last month, only to find themselves below the attendance threshold once again.

This time, the presence of a quorum was never questioned, and the official vote on a lower attendance figure went forward. The number of meeting attendees required for a binding vote will be decreased from one sixth to one eighth of the more than 700 FAS professors.

The decision to rename the Department of English and American Language and Literature to the Department of English was also confirmed after being similarly deferred from the last meeting due to the lack of quorum. 

THE LION’S DEN

Christopher M. Gordon, the chief operating officer of the Allston Development Group, closed his slideshow presentation at yesterday’s meeting with the image of one of “about a dozen” granite lion statues that construction workers have found buried at the site of the science complex under construction on the University’s new Allston campus. 

The science building’s site was formerly a construction dump area, so the lions may have once graced the tops of a building somewhere in Boston, Gordon said. The development group has not yet determined from which building the lions originally came, but Gordon said they are working with a historic research company to ascertain their origin.

In the meantime, Gordon said, the lions are being stored in a warehouse.

“If you want to see lions, we’ve got a lot of them,” he said to a laughing Faculty.

—Staff writer Maxwell L. Child can be reached at mchild@fas.harvard.edu

—Staff writer Christian B. Flow can be reached at cflow@fas.harvard.edu