A Free Market for Gen Ed

Nearly eight months after the Harvard College Curricular Review’s (HCCR) Committee on General Education submitted the first, abortive draft of its recommendations, its final document is complete. Underlying the recommendations is a guiding vision of interdisciplinarity, accountability, and flexibility that previous drafts conspicuously lacked. They stress cross-department cooperation, put the onus on professors to enhance the quality of their classes, and give students far more avenues by which to complete their general education requirements. As the committee’s document is debated piece-by-piece in the coming weeks and months, it is crucial that these priorities remain central; otherwise, the coherent vision that the committee has long labored to craft will be lost amidst the chaotic competition of individual faculty interests.

The committee’s recommendations strike a difficult but effective balance between stressing subject matter over the “methods” of the Core Curriculum while simultaneously emphasizing flexibility in course selection above all else. A common refrain from critics of the Core has been that Harvard students can fulfill distribution requirements by taking very specific classes (a class on the Cuban Revolution 1956-1971, for instance, satisfies a Historical Studies B requirement). The Core’s approach is rooted in the philosophy that general education should be about learning “methods” rather than absorbing a body of knowledge. The committee’s proposals address the shortcomings of the Core in two ways. First, the committee recommends a new structure of distribution requirements, grouping them into three broad categories instead of 11 core areas. The committee envisions that this “three-by-three” setup, where students will have to take three courses in the two categories outside of their concentration, will be complemented by effort on behalf of departments to make some of their content-heavy courses more accessible to those outside of the concentration. Second, the committee also envisions a robust array of “Courses in General Education”—yearlong portal courses that would cover a swath of subject matter in an interdisciplinary way.

Both of these proposals stand to make Harvard students better educated. Though students can still get away with fulfilling their “Study of Societies” requirement with three very specific courses, it is likely that the best, most easily accessible courses will be those designed with the general education requirement in mind. This is the essential genius of the committee’s recommendations. Short of imposing a strict “Great Books” style program on all incoming students, there is no way to ensure that Harvard students will acquire a sufficiently broad body of knowledge by anyone’s standards. The only recourse, then, is exactly the one the committee suggests: make sure courses intended for general education purposes are especially compelling and well-taught.

This will be a challenge in itself. By advocating a general education requirement defined by the quality of the classes offered, the committee is effectively basing the content of the requirement on free market principles. No longer will Core professors be able to offer courses on their own narrow interests and be assured that students will take them. The committee’s recommendations will erase the captive audience of Core-conscious students forced to take an artificially small body of classes. The biggest classes post-HCCR will be the most rewarding and accessible ones, not ones carrying an arbitrary distinction as a Core. The challenge will be to ensure that these popular courses are content-, not method-based.

To guarantee that its recommendations actually have an effect on the content of students’ general education, the committee should do even more to incentivize broad courses. Originally, the committee had suggested that the yearlong portal courses count for all three semesters of a distributive requirement. It should revive this suggestion, as portal courses look likely to be the broadest, most rigorous options for students.

Basing general education on the free market is a bold step that avoids the normativity of imposed general education requirements while also transitioning away from the methods-based classes of the Core. No doubt, many professors will not be pleased. Core professors stand to lose their built-in supply of students, and the committee did little to explicitly define what a general education looks like other than to highlight interdisciplinarity. At future faculty meetings, the stickiest point will be the three-by-three system—as many faculty members will likely object to a general education structure that doesn’t explicitly require math, or life sciences, or moral reasoning, or foreign cultures. But the answer is simple. If professors teach their courses well, students will come. We look forward to a new paradigm of general education, one where students are empowered with options and individual faculty are empowered with the responsibility to engage students in interesting, worthwhile courses.