Gentlemen And Gen Ed

Many of the suggestions for curriculum reform received by Dean May centered on the General Education program.

Gen Ed was originally conceived in the mid-1940's- the result of a famous Faculty report on "General Education in a Free Society" known since as "the Redbook". Its purpose, as described by current Gen Ed director Edward T. Wilcox, was to provide "a core curriculum, organized around a central principle of a shared experience with reference to the heritage of Western civilization."

The Doty report on General Education, in 1965, reaffirmed this principle.

George Goethals told May in his letter, "What it means to be a liberally educated man, these days, is very different from what that term meant as short a time ago as 1965, when the Doty report was accepted." General Education today, he said, "still has about it the patina of the education of a gentleman."

Gentlemen

"For students these days a liberally educated man is not construed in terms of the introspective gentleman,

but rather in terms of the socially perceptive activist. This is a very different psychological set than, the one I knew myself at Harvard College, when majoring in the Humanities, in their various forms, was seen as the only way a human being could fit himself for the bleak world of the Depression."

"Wilcox, in a letter to the Committee of Fifteen, calls the Redbook chauvinistic and dated." He said the new role of the Committee on General Education has been to initiate experiments in the curriculum.

Giles Constable writes, "There are still a great many post-World War Two values built into the General Education program, especially among the senior Faculty," among whom Gen Ed is "something of a stepchild."

May received proposals to eliminate Gen Ed requirements, increase the number of courses, and turn the whole thing over to the Houses. In any case a surprising number of senior and junior Faculty members agreed with Goethals, who said, "We do, indeed, I think, need a revolution in higher education."