Gen Ed Forced To Get Practical

As one of 10 professors on the committee vested with implementing the College’s first curricular overhaul in 30 years, science professor John Huth does not take his obligations lightly. One morning this spring, he had to drop his daughter off at school, take his car to the mechanic, bike to his office, and change into a dress shirt there, all by 8:30 a.m.—to make it to a General Education committee meeting, where he would help hammer out course proposals for an hour and a half. It’s behind-the-scenes labors like these that have occupied the Gen Ed committee over much of the last two years, as the College looks to turn the Gen Ed legislation passed by the Faculty in 2007 into a concrete set of courses for incoming freshmen in the class of 2013—all of whom will fall under the new program. The work thus far has been more struggle than seamless shift. There’s always an “enormous gap” between rules and practice, says the History department’s director of undergraduate studies, Daniel L. Smail, suggesting that it will be the work of the last two years, culminating next fall, that will be of most consequence for the new curriculum, and not its theoretical conception.

“If you take my view, it’s the practice that matters—not the legislation,” Smail says. “Curricular reforms are never going to create happy faculty or happy students, but we’ll find a way to make it work.”

Other faculty members are similarly pragmatic.

The next three to five years will be a time for trial and error, says Associate Dean of Undergraduate Education Stephanie H. Kenen—who will serve as Gen Ed’s administrative director next year.

“A new curriculum does not spring fully formed from Zeus’ head,” she says. And indeed, Gen Ed has already begun to be faced with the questions that the conceptual outline of the program never had to address.

LITTLE VENTURE CAPITAL

The problem of resources—both in terms of financial support and faculty time—looms large over Gen Ed’s launch.

The Gen Ed committee’s primary challenge has been to ensure that students have a wide enough variety of courses to choose from in the fall, according to former Gen Ed committee member Alexander N. Chase-Levenson ’08—placing the burden on professors to develop more offerings.

“We can’t have anything new unless colleagues send us forward something new,” says Gen Ed committee member Julie Buckler, who is also a Slavic literature professor.

Many more professors have sent in course proposals for existing Core courses than for new Gen Ed classes, according to Buckler.

But Gen Ed committee members say that they determined early on not to provide monetary incentives or teaching relief to encourage professors to develop new Gen Ed courses. Buckler says that providing monetary incentives would open a “Pandora’s box,” and teaching students outside of one’s department is already an obligation for professors in principle.

“We’ve given almost no carrots to dispense, and the only stick we’ve been given is to refuse proposals, which we don’t like to do unless it’s obvious that they don’t fit the Gen Ed mandate,” says Gen Ed committee member Edward J. Hall, who adds that he wishes that the body had the money to give professors summer stipends to create new courses.

Since more classes still need to be developed, the Gen Ed committee will not allow caps on course enrollment (originally a tenet of the program) in front-of-the-book Gen Ed classes for the next few years because the menu of Gen Ed courses would not otherwise be varied enough to meet student demand next year, Kenen says.

Meanwhile, as the Faculty shrinks—part of Faculty of Arts and Sciences Dean Michael D. Smith’s plan to close FAS’ remaining $143 million deficit by reducing “people costs”—the resulting personnel situation makes it less likely that professors will extend themselves, according to several faculty members.

ENTRENCHMENT

In at least one case, the potential for creating new Gen Ed classes has been hindered by the restriction of the terms of the Gen Ed legislation—a difficult fit for some subjects.

When Economics professor N. Gregory Mankiw submitted a course proposal for his current Core class Social Analysis 10: “Principles of Economics” (Ec10) for credit in the “United States in the World” category in January 2008, the Gen Ed committee agreed that Ec10 “didn’t belong” in the category the way it was, according to former Gen Ed committee member Alexander “Zander” N. Li ’08. So, the committee rejected the longstanding class.

But Mankiw would not take no for an answer. He resisted the committee’s suggestions to tweak Ec10, either by giving it more of a focus on current events or historical context to fit the “United States in the World” category, or more mathematical rigor in order to make it fall under “Empirical and Mathematical Reasoning,” according to Li.

Although Mankiw declined an interview request for this article, he wrote in an e-mail to The Crimson in April 2008 that the Task Force on General Education had “inadequate appreciation of the role of analytic social science,” and that the debate over where Ec10 fits in Gen Ed is “a symptom of these flaws.”

The Economics Department’s leadership—which similarly felt as though quantitative social science had been left out in the cold—stood with Mankiw in solidarity. According to several Gen Ed committee members, department chair James H. Stock and director of undergraduate studies Jeffrey A. Miron visited a Gen Ed committee meeting to argue that Ec10 still belonged in the “United States in the World” exactly as it was.

According to former Gen Ed committee member Chase-Levenson, Stock seemed to be “chafing” at the idea that he had to justify Ec10’s place in Gen Ed at all. At the meeting, according to Gen Ed committee members, Stock shifted impatiently in his chair and said he had to meet with an important Federal Reserve official within the hour, and he expected that Ec10 would get approved before he left.

Ec10 did not enter Gen Ed so easily.

The same back-and-forth between the Gen Ed committee and the Economics department dragged on through the spring, without reaching a resolution until the summer—when some of the committee was not aware and did not have a say.

FAS Dean Michael D. Smith said in a recent interview that he played his part “behind the scenes” in getting Ec10 approved. According to Hall, administrative pressure forced Harris and Kenen to approve Ec10. Harris did not inform the committee until the fall that the class had been approved to count toward either “United States of the World” or “Empirical and Mathematical Reasoning” if taken for the full year—but not both.

Kenen, Harris, Miron, Stock, and Mankiw all declined to comment on the specifics behind Ec10’s approval.

Since Gen Ed lacks a clear category for economics, economists have met the curriculum with indifference or hostility.

“I don’t see how you can possibly evaluate different things without knowing some microeconomics that’s global or national,” says Economics Professor Ariel Pakes. “We should be producing intelligent citizens.”

Although the department is Harvard’s largest in terms of concentrators, only one Economics course in Gen Ed so far was designed specifically for the new curriculum.

Like their colleagues in Littauer, according to Smail, historians find Gen Ed’s intellectual structure to be problematic—particularly because the lack of a straightforward historical requirement, in contrast to the Core’s two Historical Study categories.

Adam G. Beaver, the History department’s outgoing assistant director of undergraduate studies, says that he finds Gen Ed to be an “inferior, warmed-over version of the Core,” which—while seeking to produce global citizens—should teach students where they came from as well as where they are going.

But Beaver adds that the department views submitting a variety of course proposals to the curriculum as the best way to ensure that students outside the concentration still appreciate history.

Some professors have been less optimistic, declaring that Gen Ed’s structure is too flawed to survive without requiring some restructuring.

“I suspect that Gen Ed in its present form won’t last quite as long as the Core did before it had to be revised,” says History of Art and Architecture Professor Jeffrey F. Hamburger.

A committee will be appointed to review Gen Ed’s progress in 2012—five years after the May 2007 Faculty vote when the legislation was approved.

LIGHTS, CAMERA, ACTION

In spite of these hurdles, Gen Ed boosters still emphasize the program’s potential for innovative pedagogy and greater flexibility for students’ schedules—as long as professors put in the time to develop new classes.

Both committee members and professors emphasize that a wider variety of classes can count toward Gen Ed in contrast to the Core—either in terms of departmental alternatives or more novel courses.

While Core courses were required to have a midterm and final exam and were not allowed to cap the class size at a small number, plans call for Gen Ed classes to take any number of shapes.

To try to help fulfill Gen Ed’s innovative potential, the Gen Ed committee has directed professors to the Provost Fund for Instructional Technology and the Bok Center to help give them guidance and funding, according to Kenen.

A few Gen Ed classes are trying to draw students in with different pedagogical techniques, including a greater use of technology.

East Asian Studies professor Shigehisa Kuriyama ’77 put a three-minute course trailer online for his offering Culture and Belief 11: “Medicine and the Body in East Asia and Europe” and required students last fall to create an iMovie every week to respond to the readings.

Kuriyama says that those assignments encouraged students to do all the readings and think about them thoughtfully—in contrast to the way students prepare readings for weekly sections in many classes.

But not all professors are optimistic that technology alone will be able to carry the curriculum.

“It’s not a magic bullet,” former Dean of the College and Computer Science Professor Harry R. Lewis ’68 says of the use of technology in the classroom.

TRANSFORMING INTO SOMETHING ‘TRANSFORMATIVE’

The Gen Ed committee dedicated its first few months to trying to define what kinds of classes would fit into each of the eight categories mandated by the Gen Ed legislation of 2007, according to committee members—an indication of just how vague its terms were viewed to be.

But over time, the committee has framed the openness of the legislation’s wording as an opportunity to encourage professors to teach whatever they want, however they want, to make their field of expertise accessible and exciting to non-concentrators.

Gen Ed committee members say they hope that the lessons students learn in Gen Ed courses will “stick” with them after they graduate and shape them into more thoughtful human beings.

“The Core was in some ways linked to the academy or to have a better sense of why academics do what they do,” Kenen says. “Gen Ed is more about how this body of knowledge is going to affect who you’re going to be.”

Meanwhile, Harris—forever a 4:50 a.m. riser—is still visiting departments, seeking to recruit courses. Kenen is still organizing papers in her office in University Hall and working out logistical issues with administrators. And Gen Ed committee members are trying their best to ramp up enthusiasm.

The attitude is a shift from the Gen Ed committee’s original outlook when they first met in the fall of 2007.

“As a curriculum, as a grouping of categories, it would be hard to say that anyone was genuinely excited about it,” former Gen Ed committee member Li says of the group, adding that none of them saw it as a “radical shift” from the Core.

Buckler says she hopes that students will find Gen Ed courses to be “an actual experience that really counts for something.”

“[Gen Ed classes] should feel real—not something you just have to sleepwalk through so you can check off the box,” Buckler says. “It shouldn’t feel arcane or ‘academic.’ It should feel like a mind-opening kind of experience—accessible yet really stimulating, even transformative.”

She paused and chuckled. “Even though that’s kind of idealistic.”

—Staff writer Bonnie J. Kavoussi can be reached at kavoussi@fas.harvard.edu.