The Debate Ends

The tangible results of the three-year discussion of General Education have been so insubstantial that a single vote of today's Faculty meeting could reverse them all. Professor Moise's amendment, which would permit a student to fulfill his General Education requirement by taking departmental courses, would be enough to nullify the reinvigoration which Dean Ford believes the program has received from the debates.

The basis of Moise's amendment is his belief that Gen Ed has brought nothing to the College but "introductory courses for nonspecialists" and that a student examining a field outside his major should "study it as if he were studying it for keeps"-that is, as a specialist.

The General Education program originally superseded a distribution scheme dictated by just this kind of logic. The Faculty apparently felt then that a Harvard education should impart more than a specialist's insights, that a student should be asked to step back from departmental studies and examine a broad area of knowledge from an interdepartmental viewpoint. Much of the Redbook philosophy has since been called into question, but the value of good General Education courses seems as great today as it did then. The Faculty reaffirmed the Gen Ed requirement by a two-on-one vote last spring and we hope it does so again today by defeating Professor Moise's amendment.

If the amendment is defeated, the Faculty will more on to consider the Committee on Educational Policy's proposals for revision in the curriculum. This program would permit a student to fulfill his Gen Ed requirement either by taking a lower-level Gen Ed course, as all students presently must de, or by taking first a lower-level departmental course and then an upper-level Gen Ed course. Not included in the legislation but, according to Edward Wilcox, "the sense of the CEP," is the idea that such a two-step requirement would have to be a sequence of courses, that a student would be asked to take first, say, Economics 1, and then an upper level Gen Ed course which had Ec 1 as a prerequisite.

It was this last provision that drew the greatest number of comments at October's Faculty meeting. Professors Riesman and Albritton suggested that a student should be able to fulfill his requirements at the upper level without becoming involved in a sequence.

Certainly to exclude all present upper-level courses from being counted for Gen Ed course credit would be to fly in the face of all logic. These courses are presently distinguished from lower-level courses by being smaller, designed for upperclassmen, for the most part, half-courses. But the Faculty has now decided that General Education can be postponed until a student's upperclass years; and that it can be administered in small courses (Nat Sci 1 has only a handful of people in it and even Hem 4 is smaller than many upper-level courses). We see no reason that half-courses cannot be part of the Gen Ed program.

Upper-level courses that are otherwise qualified as Gen Ed courses should count for Gen Ed course credit. It has been suggested that to count such courses would be to open the gates for basically unsuitable offerings, but the General Education Committee is capable of preventing this. Accepting some of the present upper-level courses (and many are well-qualified) does not mean accepting all of them.

Dean Ford suggested after October's Faculty meeting that perhaps the language of the present Gen Ed program, that of "upper-level" courses, was not appropriate to a new one, and that the basis of distinguishing between courses might better be made "courses without prerequisites" and "courses with prerequisites." We see no reason that this suggestion could be written into legislation or, at the very least, that the words "upper level" should not be taken out of the new program. What the Faculty is doing in today's vote is, in effect, to delegate to the Committee on General Education the power of interpreting a very loosely worded program. The Committee should not be hamstrung by an insistence on retaining a concept of the present Gen Ed program when this idea tends to exclude qualified courses from being counted for Gen Ed credit.