Rethinking an Education

The letter Dean of the Faculty William C. Kirby sent to professors last October to kick off the current curricular review was filled with questions:

“What will it mean to be an educated woman or man in the first quarter of the 21st century? What should a Harvard graduate know in depth about a discipline or area? What are the enduring goals of a liberal education and how can they be provided in the setting of a modern research university?”

These questions are among those that will frame the third sweeping examination of the philosophy and structure of the undergraduate experience at Harvard in the last 60 years.

Though the review officially began in October, the four main committees that will lead the Faculty through the process were not announced until the beginning of May and will not begin meeting regularly until next fall.

This year was devoted mostly to finding students and professors to serve on these committees and to initiating discussion of the major issues and themes that the committees will seek to examine.

In his letter, Kirby urged the Faculty to approach the review by actively and energetically challenging any assumptions they might have about learning at Harvard.

“We should not shy away from the simplest—and hardest—questions,” Kirby warned.

Topics under consideration will run the gamut from finding a balance between academics and extracurriculars, to determining how best to teach the sciences; from fostering greater faculty-student contact to figuring out what to do with the much-debated Core curriculum—the establishment of which was the cornerstone of the last curricular review.

It is an ambitious load that will be tackled, Kirby and other top administrators say, in just a year’s time.

The current projected schedule calls for a “short interim report” by the end of January and for “preliminary plans” to be completed by the end of the year, according to Dean of Undergraduate Education Benedict H. Gross ’71.

If all goes according to plan, the new and improved curriculum is expected to be in place as early as Fall 2005.

But if the last curricular review is any indication, the one-year timeline may prove to be a challenge, especially if discussions next fall lead to recommendations for the dramatic revamping of the Harvard curriculum that Kirby’s rhetoric suggests.

Keeping With the Times

Harvard has developed a tradition of reviewing its undergraduate curriculum every 25 years.

Against the backdrop of World War II, then-University President James B. Conant ’14 appointed a group of professors to examine the role of “education in a free society,” with a specific focus on the way Harvard educates its undergraduates. That group’s work gave rise to the creation of the General Education (Gen Ed) system, the academic predecessor to the Core that established a set of distribution requirements for all students.

A generation later, in the wake of the tumultuous 1960s, advances in research and a growing dissatisfaction with the Gen Ed system—which many felt no longer provided an adequate educational foundation for students—then-Dean of the Faculty Henry A. Rosovsky called upon professors to once again look closely at the Harvard curriculum.

And in the fall of 2001, at the outset of the new millennium, University President Lawrence H. Summers took Harvard’s helm and made improving undergraduate education one of his top priorities.

Soon after he began his tenure, he met with top Faculty administrators to discuss major changes to the undergraduate academic program—initiating the third curricular review in less than a century. He and Kirby have made strengthening the sciences and preparing students to be citizens of an increasingly interconnected world chief among Harvard’s responsibilities for this generation.

But whether this latest review will lead to changes as vast as its predecessors’ remains to be seen.

“I have no idea if the outcome is going to be radical change or minor change,” says Dillon Professor of International Affairs Lisa L. Martin, co-chair of the committee charged with examining the overall academic experience at the College.

“I worry that it won’t be dramatic enough, that the ‘If it’s not broke, don’t fix it’ policy will prevail,” notes Reisinger Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures William Mills Todd III, former dean of undergraduate education. “There needs to be some changes, beyond fine-tuning.”

Faces of the Review

The duties of this curricular review have been split among four main committees, each of which includes one administrator, two chairs, two undergraduates, one graduate student and six Faculty members.

Each of the curricular review committees—Concentrations, Pedagogy, General Education and Overall Academic Experience—will be charged with examining and analyzing a different area or aspect of the undergraduate academic experience, according to Associate Dean of Undergraduate Education Jeffrey Wolcowitz.

For example, the committee to examine concentrations, co-chaired by Professor of Economics Lawrence F. Katz and Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures Diana Sorensen, will break down and debate the purpose and structure of the concentrations. Members will discuss such issues as joint concentrations, concentration requirements and the role of tutorials.

The Pedagogy committee will examine ways of teaching. They will scrutinize what methods are effective in the undergraduate classroom, as well as more general questions about the learning process. The Pedagogy chairs are Jones Professor of American Studies Lizabeth Cohen and Cabot Professor of Biology Richard M. Losick.

Cohen said a focus of her committee will be issues of scheduling.

“We’re going to be looking at the calendar,” says Cohen. “Do we have reading periods? Do we have exams before Christmas?”

Summers and Kirby have both expressed an interest in modifying the calendar, according to University sources.

Another committee—the General Education group—will take a broad look at the mechanisms of the Harvard undergraduate education, including such controversial issues as what to do with the Core and how to make sure students receive an education that is relevant, appropriate and complete.

It will be this group especially, chaired by Carswell Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations Peter K. Bol and Emery Professor of Chemistry Eric N. Jacobsen, that will discuss another of the questions put forth in Kirby’s letter:

“If, as I believe, there is to be a shared foundation, or ‘core,’ to a Harvard undergraduate education, how should it be conceived and how might it be best be taught?”

And the job of looking at how it all comes together will fall to the Overall Academic Experience committee, which will examine the Harvard education as a whole and how it fits within the framework of life at the College, taking into account such concepts as the first year and the way extracurricular activities fit into the academic experience. At the helm of that group are Martin and Wolfson Professor of Jewish Studies Jay M. Harris.

One thing is certain—the committees have their work cut out for them.

The Core of the Review

The central concern of this curricular review, as with its predecessors, will be Harvard’s effectiveness in providing general education for its students—and whether the Core succeeds in doing so.

Though there is a consensus among professors and administrators that the Core is broken and needs to be fixed, how to mend the system—or whether to scrap it completely—is a controversial issue on which faculty have a diverse array of opinions.

“Obviously, we need to have some sort of Gen Ed requirements,” says Martin, though she adds, “I’m not sure we have the balance now.”

“The Core is where the students get breadth, get common intellectual experiences,” says Harris. However, he characterizes it as “in need of rethinking.”

The two major questions facing the General Education committee are whether the structure of the Core is the most efficient one for providing a foundation to the Harvard curriculum and whether the theory of a general body of knowledge—on which the Core is based—is a sound one.

On structure, students complain the Core adds too much rigidity to their academic schedules. To reserve seven spaces in their plans of study for requirements is too great a restriction, many say. Also, many resent the relative difficulty, under the current system, of counting departmental courses for Core credit.

Faculty, on the other hand, seem more concerned that Core courses are not taken seriously.

The Core as it now stands represents both potential good and potential waste for students, according to Jacobsen.

“The vast majority of students are really interested in learning,” he says. “Then, when I hear those same people say, ‘I got the Core out of the way,’ it’s an enormously wasted opportunity.”

On philosophy, professors point to a need to bring students’ education in line with the issues of the day.

There seems to be a good deal of faculty support for this initiative.

In a survey of faculty opinions conducted by The Crimson this fall, 31 out of 147 professors who responded to a question that asked them to rank their priorities for the Faculty, on a scale of one to 10 (with one being most important), gave “strengthening the sciences” a one.

“People have to be much more literate about science and technology,” says Martin, adding that it is therefore imperative that students receive “adequate and high quality exposure” to those fields.

Jacobsen also says a primary challenge for the Core is the need for universality in science education, embodied in specific problems like teaching science to non-science concentrators.

“Imagine teaching, in one semester, an English class to someone who doesn’t know the language,” says Jacobsen. “So how to teach a self-contained [science] Core class that goes into enough depth to make it interesting?”

Question Everything

Beyond the Core, the consensus among those participating in the curricular review seems to be that any issue connected to undergraduate education is fair game.

Issues that are fundamental to the undergraduate experience—from student-faculty relationships to the balance between academics and extracurricular activities—will be analyzed for advantages, drawbacks and potential improvements.

“In our big kickoff meeting, Kirby told everyone to not think about the restraints and difficulty of getting stuff actually accomplished,” says Stefan T. Patrikis ’06, a member of the Committee on General Education.

That sentiment echoes Rosovsky’s request to the Faculty more than 25 years ago, when he asked that they not concern themselves overly with logistics, but with what they want to see implemented.

And although no one has a clear-cut agenda, members of the committees—and others in the Harvard community—say that there are certain central themes they would like addressed. The issue of student-faculty contact is one such area.

“I’d like to see the two pieces of faculty lives—research and teaching—as integrated as possible, to best help our students,” says Cohen.

She says she also feels there is a need for a change in certain aspects of the “culture” at Harvard as it concerns student-faculty relationships and how they affect academic choices. She says she sees too many students, often job-seeking or graduate school-hunting juniors and seniors, who have never gotten to know a faculty member.

“Learning doesn’t just happen in a lecture format,” says Cohen. “I start to see students avoiding smaller courses. We need to have a culture [in the College] where students feel comfortable in that environment.”

Another issue that will receive scrutiny is the balance between academics and extracurriculars and how to achieve one that allows for variety, dedication and time to sleep.

“Students come here and they feel like they have to do a lot of extracurriculars,” says Martin. “[The environment can] have students feeling that if they don’t do something special like running the [Institute of Politics] or something, they’ve failed.”

And that need has hurt undergraduates, Harris says.

“One does have a sense that what students have lost is unstructured time to do nothing,” he says.

The timing and rigidity of the concentrations is also an issue on the minds of those leading the curricular review.

“We ask students to concentrate as if they were mini grad students” notes Harris.

He says he worries that this might limit students’ abilities to study what interests them.

Todd expresses a similar concern.

“Another issue I would like for us to deal with in the reform is working with students to persuade them that they don’t need to be government or biochemistry to be lawyers or doctors,” he says. “They shouldn’t concentrate in something they don’t really want or love.”

Todd also says he thinks students are not given sufficient time to find the right concentration for them.

“Do we require students to declare [concentrations] too rapidly?” he mused. “I’m inclined to think we do.”

The review will also examine the structure of the actual Harvard day.

“Harvard has a very tight schedule,” said Harris, referring to the way most lecture classes are given at 11 a.m., 12 p.m. and 1 p.m. “First of all, it means that students aren’t taking classes they want to take because it conflicts with a course they’re required to take.”

These issues are just a few of those that will be touched upon during the upcoming months.

Full Steam Ahead

All of these discussion items will have been thoroughly hashed out by this time next year, those leading the review predict.

But the pace of the review thus far has been measured. After it was announced in October, the committee chairs were not officially in place until March, the students until April and the full committees until May.

These groups have convened just a couple of times, in preparation for research and data-gathering work to be done this summer and fall.

“This is what we had in mind, that the groups would meet each other a few times,” says Gross.

Beginning in the fall, the committees will meet biweekly and exchange progress and ideas via the Steering Committee, made up of Kirby, Gross, Wolcowitz, the committee chairs and Carol J. Thompson, senior advisor to the dean of the Kennedy School of Government and a former associate dean of the Faculty for academic affairs.

The coming academic year will also be a time of information-gathering, as the committees meet with various constituents of the College, such as the Undergraduate Council, members of the Houses, admissions staff, faculty and students.

The first of whatever policy changes are drafted and approved could begin to go into effect starting in the fall of 2005.

“[The schedule] depends on to what extent people want to change things,” says Patrikis. “If it ends up being more of a modification of the existing system rather than overhauling it, it’ll obviously be easier.”

The slow pace has frustrated some, including Summers.

“I think his feeling is that the review should go faster, but he understands that this is a complicated issue that will take time, and the Faculty needs to agree on it,” Gross says.

But he maintains the review is right on schedule and progressing just as he and Kirby had hoped it would.

“I’m very encouraged at this stage,” Gross says.

—Staff writer Laura L. Krug can be reached at krug@fas.harvard.edu.