Losing Face

If “general education is the public face of liberal education”—as the Task Force on General Education report declared this year—Harvard will soon be known for being muddled and uninspiring. The new curriculum, which was passed last month by a Faculty anxious not to lose face by voting down legislation that has been over four years in the making, is a flawed hodgepodge that, in trying to appease everyone, will ultimately serve no one.

When the Task Force’s preliminary report was released last October, we hoped and believed that General Education would herald a new age for undergraduate education at Harvard. Gone would be the days of inflexible requirements and begging for exemptions at the Core Office. General Education was about to heroically do away with the disenchantment of our education, replacing the Core with a slew of engaging, broad, and relevant courses.

Yet as a final report gave way to legislation, faculty debate, amendments, and a final vote, we became increasingly disillusioned. Now, General Education looks likely to achieve just the opposite of what it initially promised.

The problem is not its philosophy, which is generally sound. Unlike the Core Curriculum’s insipid promise to teach “approaches to knowledge,” the new system promises to emphasize the content of classes, integrate different academic worldviews, and, in the report’s words, “connect in an explicit way what students learn at Harvard to life beyond Harvard, and to help them understand and appreciate the complexities of the world and their role in it.”

Alas, the devil is in the details—or the lack thereof. Despite outlining a new rationale and rubric for deciding whether courses will count, General Education does not adequately address the Core’s most egregious failings: its constraining menu of course choices and poor teaching standards.

Instead of sharply defining the new system, the Faculty threw up its hand and left all of the critical elements of implementation—from deciding how many courses will count to transitioning between the Core and General Education—to a new and all-powerful committee, the Standing Committee on General Education (SCGE). There is little reason to believe that the SCGE will not precisely replicate the Core’s incoherence.

As the Core’s disintegration demonstrates, failing to spell out details of implementation is a fatal error. The Standing Committee on the Core Program (SCCP), the body responsible for the Core’s original introduction and ongoing administration, has become a bureaucratic roadblock, as demonstrated by its repeated refusal to grant Core exemptions to students who have taken departmental courses equivalent to—or harder than—Core classes. The result has been that adherence to bizarre rules, such as the stipulation that Core classes must have a midterm and a final, has taken priority over a class’s relevance and quality. The prestige and educational value that the Core was supposed to guarantee has been forgotten, and undergraduate education has suffered, turning into a curriculum that instead trains students for little more than cocktail party conversations.

The SCCP’s iron grip on Core credit also reduced the educational standard of Core classes. With no competition from departmental courses, which are not permitted to count for credit, many Core classes have been allowed to become irrelevant—like Science B-57, “Dinosaurs And Their Relatives”—while others border on the obscure—for instance, Literature and Arts B-48, “Chinese Imaginary Space.” The welcome exceptions to this rule—such as Moral Reasoning 22, “Justice”—have unsurprisingly swelled in class size.

We cannot see any reason why General Education will not go the same way, particularly if the Faculty debates of the past few months are any indication.

For instance, we were initially enthusiastic about the Task Force on General Education’s proclamation that “it is important to avoid confronting students with an overly-restricted menu.” Yet the issue of the breadth of courses that will count for General Education was completely neglected in the legislation—which was supposed to merely translate the Report into Facultese—and remained up in the air after several days of debate at Faculty meetings. Like other important details, it has been left to the arbitrary judgment of the SCGE.

Similarly, professors fought tenaciously to ensure that their particular subject would be included—and seemed to care about little else. For instance, when a bid to include history in one category failed, an amendment to require some sort of historical study succeeded. The result is a curriculum that by including everything has become bland gruel.

Consequently, students’ worst fears look set to be realized: General Education will be nothing more than Core version 2.0. Why over four years’ infighting, squabbling, and report-writing was necessary to spawn it is a mystery. The Faculty has essentially spent that time renaming course categories—who needs Moral Reasoning when one can have “Ethical Reasoning?”—while completely evading the real issues.

Nevertheless, there remains a glimmer of hope. The SCGE might demonstrate the sense its predecessor lacked and take a lax approach to departmental exemptions. Thankfully, the General Education legislation requires that the SCGE be headed by a faculty member, as opposed to an administrator, who will hopefully have a lesser sense of self-importance and a clearer sense of educational priorities.

We also hope that, despite the vague legislation, Faculty members themselves embrace its passing as an opportunity to create new and exciting courses, and to become more closely involved in undergraduate instruction. Students themselves bear the responsibility to approach their education as an opportunity for change and development, rather than a hoop-jumping exercise.

Finally, we hope that, in looking forward, the SCGE does not ignore current students. Specifically, we hope that while the new curriculum is being developed the Core is cracked open to include many departmental alternatives.

A modified Core can only be averted if the Faculty takes control of General Education’s implementation. Its introduction should involve informative feedback from students, lively campus-wide debate, and frequent evaluation. The Faculty cannot simply wash its hands of College education after four years of argument.