Plant Pedagogical Seeds

Twenty-seven years after the Core Curriculum burst onto the stage of higher education to cheers and high acclaim, it is about to be booed off. Yet it would be foolish to birth a new general education curriculum in isolation; the Core’s record must be carefully considered, lest the new system repeat its flaws. Change must begin with a fundamental shift in the Core’s administrative structure. Currently, a distinct lack of discerning judgment and capacity for constructive criticism plagues the Core’s current stewards: the Faculty’s Core Standing Committee (CSC). The Faculty should create a new student-faculty committee that more actively evaluates both course content and pedagogy when vetting and approving courses for general education credit.

Though the philosophy of the new general education is no doubt important, constructing a better system to ensure the integrity of the individual requirements and courses is perhaps even more vital to its long-term viability. A lack of strong oversight has allowed the current Core to decompose from a tight system guided by a clear rationale into the hodgepodge of specialty courses that it is today. Much of the blame goes to the CSC, which meets infrequently and prioritizes methods of student evaluation over course content when deciding which courses count for Core credit. For instance, the CSC insists that a course must have both a midterm and final examination, artificially limiting the number of courses that can satisfy a Core requirement.

In implementing the new general education curriculum, the new committee should group courses that satisfy a particular requirement into two tiers. The first will contain all of the various departmental courses that satisfy a given general education requirement. These will be determined based on an evaluation of the course’s subject material and syllabus to make sure that the course matches up with the guiding philosophy of a given area of general education. We expect that the vast majority of courses that count for general education credit will be in this tier.

The second tier will be an elite group of courses categorized as “general education courses.” These courses will be designated by their general education group; for instance, Courses of Instruction would list The Ethical Life 22, “Justice,” and The Market and Society 10, “Principles of Economics.”

Under the current Core, a non-departmental designation indicates that the Core office, rather than a department, may administer the course and (with rare exception) that the material is accessible to all students, regardless of their prior background. But to the experienced student, it usually also implies an easy course on an obscure topic with questionable lectures and quasi-competent teaching fellows.

Under the new system, courses with a “general education” designation should turn this conventional wisdom on its head. These courses must continue to remain accessible to students from all academic backgrounds, but, more importantly, their pedagogy must be certified as excellent. To that end, we propose that general education courses be more rigorously evaluated on teaching quality. This not only applies to the professor but to teaching fellows as well—these courses should only select teaching fellows with proven track records of quality and experience and a solid command of the English language.

This sort of quality control, however, means nothing without policing power. To that end, the Faculty should establish a new standing committee on general education comprised of both faculty members and students. Unlike the current CSC, however, the new committee should continually and proactively evaluate courses both to determine whether they can satisfy a general education requirement and whether they meet the pedagogical standards to be listed as a “general education” course. It should also be more active in soliciting student and faculty input on which existing courses might satisfy a general education requirement. The current system usually requires a professor to submit an application to the CSC, which places too high of a burden on professors and leads to too few Core classes. The new committee should seek out potential general education courses, rather than the reverse.

“A more active committee,” however, is a platitude unless the committee changes in two specific ways. First, it must meet more frequently. This will help to prevent the situation the CSC found itself in this September, when it could not certify the Core status of four new Humanities courses until the Committee’s first meeting in October, leaving it to Dean of the Faculty Jeremy R. Knowles and Dean of the College Benedict H. Gross ’71 to fastrack them into the Core. Second, committee members must conduct unannounced audits of classes that have already been given, or may be awarded, a “general education” designation. In addition to determining whether a course should be listed under general education, these audits should provide valuable feedback to professors about how to improve their teaching.

The audits’ intention is not to build a culture of distrust between faculty members. Rather, our hope is that a culture in which faculty members feel free to provide constructive criticism to their colleagues will develop. This is already the case at many of Harvard’s professional schools, where professors will sit in on lectures and collegially make suggestions about a fellow professor’s teaching. We see no reason why this should not also be the case in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Professors who do not wish to submit to such constructive scrutiny probably do not care enough about undergraduate education to merit what should be a prestigious “general education” designation for their classes.

The best hope for an improvement in Harvard’s pedagogy—an area in which it has consistently lagged behind—lies in the genesis of a culture grounded in mutual, constructive critique. Given the vast scale of the Harvard curriculum, we believe that the new general education system, the common intellectual ground of every College student, is the natural starting point for such improvements. In the long run, however, pedagogical improvement must not end with these courses. In fact, we hope that such a culture change will develop across the Faculty of Arts and Sciences—the new system of general education is merely the best place to sow the seeds.