Before the Core: The History of General Education at Harvard

Who could possibly prefer Chem 20 to "the major religious and philosophical conceptions of man"? In the abstract, it is very hard to criticize the liberal values of the Core Curriculum proposal. Everyone agrees that pre-professionalism is a bad thing, and the ideals of a liberal arts education--the inculcation of moral values, an introduction to the history of culture--sound very noble. Liberal arts humanism seems so superior to pre-professional narrowness that the few course requirements in the Core proposal seem quite reasonable.

For most of its history, after all, the General Education program resembled the Core program in its current form quite closely. In 1949, when Gen Ed became a regular part of education at Harvard, students were required to take three lower level Gen Ed courses. The distribution requirement had to be filled by taking middle group or departmental courses. The 1949 system was essentially the same as the Core Curriculum that is now being debated: students were permitted a limited choice of courses in a few prescribed areas, except that in 1949 there were three areas while the current proposal calls for five.

Ten years after Gen Ed began, the Faculty modified the program slightly by permitting science concentrators to substitute departmental courses for their Nat Sci requirement. In the late '60s, after incessant Faculty debate, the requirements remained the same although the number of Gen Ed courses increased dramatically. The decisive break with the original system only came in 1971 when the Faculty set up the current system of departmentalized bypasses, and allowed the more specialized middle group courses to count the same as lower group courses. The Core proposal, therefore, is not a step 40 years into the past, but only a step seven years into the past.

But discussing the Core proposal either in terms of requirements or of abstract philosophy leaves the most important educational questions unanswered. High sounding phrases about the values of Western culture do not explain why the liberal arts tradition has decayed, or why specialization has grown to dominate academic life. An examination of the history of liberal education at Harvard suggests that the liberal arts ideal may be threatened by social and educational trends which a core curriculum alone would be powerless to reverse.

The Faculty committee that designed General Education intended it to fulfill two purposes: to combat academic specialization and to provide students with the cultural foundations for life in American society. But changes in the academic and social environment have made these goals appear in a very different light. The title of that committee's 1945 report, "General Education in a Free Society," immediately conjures up the specter of the Fascist society that America had just helped defeat in war. When President Conant in 1936 called for an educational program that could resist the "wave of anti-intellectualism sweeping around the world," the purpose and the value of the liberal arts ideal was very clear. But while liberal arts has continued to embody American values, these values no longer seem as noble as they did after the defeat of Hitler. In the '60s, the Vietnam War came to dominate the American political scene and the education Harvard designed for a "community of free men" looked suspicious to people who doubted the reality of freedom in America.

Radicals have often criticized the philosophy behind the liberal arts ideal. It is hard to persuade students who want revolutionary change in American society that they should first immerse themselves in the cultural life of a society they believe is fundamentally corrupt. Radicals have charged that political ideas always underlay the concept of a liberal arts education. The conflict between liberal education and radical education is a question that has to be resolved before discussions of requirements can take place.

General Education was created to fight specialization at precisely the time when specialization first began to take over academic life. But specialization was only part of a revolution in education that took place after the war. The creators of General Education thought specialization was a more or less inevitable result of an "explosion of knowledge" in the 20th century, but it is actually a product of these revolutionary developments.

In 1945, a Ph.D. was still a rare and valued commodity, scholarly journals had not yet begun to proliferate and the academic community was small and closely knit. Education in general had not become the major industry it is today. Immediately after World War II high school and college enrollments began to increase rapidly. At first returning soldiers swelled the number of students; later an expanding population fueled the growth in demand for education. General Education was in part intended to help absorb the new influx of students coming from a more varied educational background. But the same developments that persuaded the Faculty to create General Education also helped produce the specialization that is now destroying it.

As college enrollment expanded, schools had to create large numbers of new academic positions. While this increase in itself does not imply specialization, the expansion of the education industry created a need for easily measurable criteria for qualifying prospective teachers, and the criterion devised was the publication of scholarly articles. Today libraries are filled with scholarly books and journals that only professional scholars read. The production of this kind of academic writing is unrelated to teaching. In fact, a specialized scholar is less able to teach undergraduates--unless the students aspire to academic careers.

The growing specialization of professional academics naturally shaped the education of non-professionals. Professors who win tenure for books on 13th century lead mining are not likely to encourage their students to take interdisciplinary approaches to learning. The idea of a senior thesis is clearly derived from graduate school practice, and departments often require undergraduate theses to be as specialized as graduate ones. No one can be sure that this kind of mimicry is useful in undergraduate education, but it is also hard to see how undergraduate education can be insulated from the rest of the academic world.

In 1964, the student Committee on Educational Policy took up the question of the academic context of General Education. Although the students expressed an ardent belief in the values of liberal education, they underlined the contradiction between the goals of the General Education program and the specialized departments, arguing in a report that the "college should be fundamentally interdisciplinary in its approach to education". The committee proposed a possible concentration in Gen Ed which would be designed by each student individually, and suggested the creation of interdisciplinary seminars and tutorials. Yet the Faculty never accepted the students' proposals.

In the late '60s students no longer looked for ways to put new life into liberal arts education--they attacked it as a tool of an oppressive social order. Instead of demanding more general education students tended to demand courses more relevant to particular contemporary problems. In a way, it was easier for the Faculty to satisfy these demands than those put forward by the 1964 Committee on Educational Policy. The Faculty was able to introduce an abundance of new Gen Ed courses dealing with the American political power structure and energy development without changing the overall structure or the philosophy of undergraduate education. And when the political commitment of the students began to weaken, Gen Ed courses became more specialized, often dealing with obscure topics like Inner Asian history, or else became means of circumventing the spirit, if not the letter, of Gen Ed requirements. In a sense, the radicals of the '60s fought liberal arts education only to win a victory for specialized academia.

Liberal education seems to yield easily to the pressures of social forces. In the first ten years of the Gen Ed program, all students, including science majors, were required to take natural science courses taught from a historical perspective. The requirement originated in the praiseworthy idea that scientists should be introduced to the social implications of science and the moral issues it involves. But two years after Sputnik frightened America into expanding its science education program, the Faculty stopped using the historical method in its Gen Ed sciences courses and allowed science students to bypass Gen Ed science courses altogether. Apparently the Faculty was persuaded by a Faculty committee's call for "a larger pool of scientists," and allowed their liberal arts values to slide.

While the Core proposal seems to be well intentioned, there is no reason why the new core curriculum should hold out against specialization and pre-professionalism any better than the original Gen Ed program did. In the midst of an acute job crunch it seems unlikely that the academic profession will be willing to restructure itself radically and experiment with new kinds of qualifications.

The crucial question, then, is whether the idea of liberal arts has the power to transform the educational system, or whether the Core proposal is just an anachronistic attempt to resurrect a dead ideal. Proponents of the Core are fighting the educational trends of the last 30 years. It seems that the undertaking will be enormous, and the Core proposal represents only a small step along the way to a liberal education.