Doty Attacks Constable's Gen Ed Plan

Paul M. Doty, chairman of the special committee to review Gen Ed, indicated concern last night that the Faculty may take what he considers an easy way out in the current debate on his committee's report.

Many faculty members, he said, may be attracted by the simplicity of the straight distribution requirement proposed at the November Faculty meeting by Giles Constable '50, associate professor of History.

"People have raised a number of objections to the report," Doty said, "but I think it would be a disservice all around if these oppositions coalesced on some trivially easy program."

"I hope there will be a long debate," he said. "It all depends upon how much stamina the Faculty has."

The Doty Committee dissolved itself when it presented its report and cannot officially respond to criticisms. "For myself," Doty said, "I don't think Constable's plan would work, and when he has it precisely defined I will try to explain why."

Doty outlined two major objections to a simple distribution requirement: the need for "too many restrictions" and the lack of any "quality control" over the courses used to satisfy the requirement.

"There are a number of small courses at Harvard," Doty said, "which, while valuable in themselves, are not really appropriate for distribution." He added that under a program like Constable's "students would become very good at finding those courses."

Doty also predicted that maintaining Gen Ed on a voluntary basis, as Constable suggested, would "make the existing situation worse." The Committee on General Education would have an even harder time than it now does in organizing good courses, he said, and it would be afraid to scrap the bad ones, for fear the program would dwindle out of existence.

Responding to complaints that the report never really defines a gen ed course, Doty said he doubted that a "general description" is possible. "You can say a few things. It should be interdisciplinary. It should be concerned with key points rather than taking a comprehensive approach. But when you come to ask a specific question--is Ec 1 a Gen Ed course, for instance--you find you have to expand you original statement."