From the time of President Eliot's Five-Foot Shelf, educators have sought repeatedly to offset specialization in American colleges. Harvard's General Education program has been one of the broadest of these attempts to infuse, as President Conant wrote, "the liberal and humane tradition into our entire educational system."

Under the old distribution system, students could, for example, fulfill a science requirement with an elementary math course. Under General Education, students conform to the spirit as well as the letter of the law. Its success in accomplishing this conformity is reflected in its acceptance by the undergraduate, to whom its objectives have become as familiar as the term "gen ed" itself.

This acceptance has been encouraging to the administrators of the program, but it has magnified one of the basic problems of General Education. Now, on the tenth anniversary of the "sacred redbook"--the report of the Committee on General Education in a Free Society--and as Kenneth B. Murdock '16 takes over the chairmanship of the effective Committee on General Education, the problem again becomes significant: how to maintain the faculty's initial interest in the experiment, both for the benefit of General Education and for the general curiculum.

Unlike such transitory procedural problems as enrollment limits, the questions of the faculty's relation to General Education has been an important one since the inauguration of the program. It was a problem of a reversible reaction for the founders.

Curious, Not Compulsed

First, in the words of Paul H. Buck, former provost, and chairman of the committee which wrote the "redbook": "Our problem was to get the Harvard faculty interested in teaching students who are curious rather than compulsed," with the hope that the experimental enthusiasm would in large part counter the danger of superficiality in the basic survey courses.

To see that this broad aim of renewing interest in teaching has been achieved, one need speak only to Charles H. Taylor, Lea Professor of Medieval History. Before the coming of General Education, Taylor gave History 1, a popular but factual course, studying for which required such aids as chronological outlines.

As important as it was, however, to history concentrators, Taylor agrees that its successor under Gen Ed, Social Sciences 1, has succeeded ing provoking important ideas as well as providing facts, and in improving teaching methods. "I appreciate extremely the opportunity to convert History 1 to Social Sciences 1. I, and I think the staff, have enjoyed it much more, and felt that we have been giving a much better article for both concentrator and non-concentrator."

Even a critic of General Education, such as Howard Mumford Jones, who laments the passing of the free elective system in the current Atlantic, believes that, "Whether or not the goal is reached, the enthusiasm from a special belief in General Education is all to the good."

It would be manifestly incorrect to say that the faculty, before General Education, was not interested in teaching, or that there were not already faculty members giving departmental courses in the spirit of general education. "General Education gave members of the faculty the opportunity to do what they already wanted to do," asserts Samuel H. Beer, professor of Government and General Education. "If it hadn't, it wouldn't have worked."

'A Man . . . Out of Himself'

General Education not only provided the opportunity for those already interested; it provided an atmosphere convincing to those who weren't. Its very creation provoked, in President Pusey's words, "a real enthusiasm and a release of vitality."

This spirit was wisely encouraged, for although each of the three areas of Gen Ed sought common goals on the lower level, courses were not restricted to a single approach. Professors, were instead given latitude in adapting old courses, as in Taylor's case, or in creating entirely new ones--in order to provide the same pill with coatings variously-flavored for the students, and also, as Beer asserts, because "the only way to get a good course is for a man to make it out of himself."

In the lower level courses, at least, this diversity has created a problem of focus. In the Social Sciences, the focus is "an examination of the institutional and theoretical aspects of the Western heritage," while the approaches vary from historical survey to anthropological analysis.

How to make the common aim continually apparent is thus an essential element of the program. In the Natural Sciences, there is, according to Gerald J. Holton, associate professor of Physics and General Education, great consideration for "how to put the material across"--through frequent intra-area meetings.