Toward a New Gen Ed

With the recent release of the General Education Review Committee’s final report, a redesigned Gen Ed program seems inevitable. The new Gen Ed program should present the best teaching that Harvard has to offer while attracting students to courses both inside and outside their disciplines. While we still have concerns about the proposed structure of the new set of requirements, we are glad that the report directly addresses the need for improving the quality of teaching in Gen Ed courses.

For example, the report stresses the importance of pedagogy, proposing “high-visibility incentives” for professors and the creation of a professorship "explicitly designed to award faculty teaching well in the Gen Ed Program.” These ideas will guarantee that no professor approaches Gen Ed teaching as a trivial afterthought.

In the same vein, increasing the resources given to the Gen Ed program is a positive development. Teaching fellows with more training, smaller section sizes, and incentives to teach well in the Gen Ed program will lead to better learning for undergraduates. These laudable initiatives from the review committee underline its understanding of the sources of discontent with the current system and its determination to alleviate them.

Nevertheless, even the new system continues to pose issues for teaching quality. If, for example, Gen Ed classes are to remain at roughly the same size, departments in the natural sciences and the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences which currently provide fewer Gen Ed courses will need to create more.

Throughout discussions of improving the quality of teaching within the Gen Ed program, a sometimes overlooked issue is the current model of graduate student teaching. A case in point is Professor Shaye J.D. Cohen’s course on the Hebrew Bible, notorious for being an easy way to satisfy the Culture and Belief General Education requirement. Cohen himself acknowledged as much this week when he said that “rigorous demands” for coursework would deter students from enrolling. For Cohen, ensuring a large enrollment in his courses is important because without large Gen Ed courses, his graduate students “would all go hungry” for lack of teaching positions.

In the last section of its January final report, the General Education Review Committee pointed to this exact issue, observing that “the current graduate teaching model motivates some faculty to maximize course enrollment… as a way to support their Department’s graduate programs.” Recognizing this flaw is a crucial first step to improving the pedagogy of the Gen Ed problem.

Indeed, undergraduate teaching is directly affected by funding concerns for graduate students. Students in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences are generally expected to teach during their third and fourth years of study as part of their funding packages. In departments like history, however, fourth year graduate students are expected to be off campus conducting research. Were the report to fully address these administrative differences as well as the issues with how graduate students are employed, it would give us more confidence that the revamped Gen Ed program will result in a higher quality of teaching.

Since the report calls for the creation of classes outside of existing academic departments, cooperation between the departments and the Gen Ed program is crucial. Harvard must ensure that Professors and TFs have the resources to put pedagogy first. We hope that the review committee’s report will give impetus to this change.