The program of General Education that came from General Education in a Free Society fifteen years ago reflected well the intentions that President Conant expressed when he appointed the Committee on the Objectives of General Education in a Free Society. That Committee had two purposes: one general, to provide a counterbalance for the department scholarship that dominated undergraduate teaching, and one specific, to create a program that would put Harvard in touch with a growing sense among the nation's intellectuals that higher education was neglecting the great books and ideas, which were the foundation of the Western intellectual heritage.
This second intention had no especially remarkable implications for courses about history, literature, or philosophy. But the program was set up to span the intellectual range of the University, and when the Committee tried to outline courses in the sciences that would fit within a framework of studying the Western intellectual heritage it ran into severe difficulties. The resolution was to teach science through the case method and the history of science, a method that produced several excellent courses but was a very compromised way of introducing students to modern science.
Less than ten years ago, a new General Education program began to emerge in the midst of the old Social Sciences 1, originally put in the curriculum in order to placate the History Department, began to turn into a pure history course; Humanities 6, a course designed to teach students how to read, was added to the curriculum; and Jerome Bruner, with George Miller, set up Social Sciences 8--a survey of the modern behavioral sciences. Finally Bruner chaired a committee that reevaluated the teaching of the Natural Sciences program.
The Bruner committee was established because very few scientists felt comfortable with the Natural Sciences program suggested by General Education in a Free Society, and, consequently, it was exceedingly difficult to get scientists to teach in the program. The committee proposed that General Education courses teach science instead of the history of science and explore one field deeply instead of using the case method. Those who cleaved to the program Conant had supported were profoundly dissatisfied with the proposal and when it was adopted with the support of the General Education committee, some of those who had worked hardest on the old Natural Sciences program felt betrayed.
By this time, then, there were two entirely different General Education programs operating simultaneously: one historical and rooted in Western traditions, the other contemporary and devoted to teaching in a liberal vein. A situation of incipient chaos was aggravated by two academic innovations that became law under the sponsorship of then-Dean McGeorge Bundy.
Chaos
The first of these was the Advanced Placement program, which permitted a student who had done college-level work in three subjects to enter as a sophomore, and to skip two of his required General Education courses. This led, in turn, to a well-founded suspicion that someone in a position of authority thought that General Education courses were more or less interchangeable with other courses and also thought that three college-level courses of any sort could be equated in some way with two General Education courses. The second confusing innovation was the Freshman Seminar program--for suddenly the General Education committee found itself under strong pressure to count some of the Freshman Seminars as equivalent to General Education courses.
In effect, the only criteria by which the Committee was judging proposed course in 1960 were that the teacher be acceptable, the course be general, and the relevant department be unwilling to offer the course. Even the last two of these criteria were not applied very seriously in the sciences. And under these circumstances, it was understandable that the Committee could not cope effectively with the challenge of the Freshman Seminar program.
Since 1955 the General Education program has been held together by the personalities of Kenneth B. Murdock and John H. Finley, Jr., the last two chairmen of the committee. But there was little left of the original program except a conviction that General Education lay outside of the departments, and there was no co-herent policy within the program.
A well-meaning CRIMSON editor even suggested turning the Freshman Seminar program over to the General Education Committee, on the grounds that General Education didn't have a program, so there could be no conflict, and both were potentially good things, and should be under the same administration.
What Nose?
At this juncture, President Pusey appointed a committee under Paul Doty to reevaluate the entire program.
When Conant appointed the committee that formulated the original program, he explained that he had used the phrase "General Education" because he knew that many scholars felt their discipline provided a liberal education if properly taught, but he thought that few would claim that their field provided a general education. That distinction is the crux of one of the major problems that confronts the Doty committee.
A second important distinction has been obscured by the trichotomy of Humanities, Natural Sciences, and Social Sciences which was used instead of the more appropriate dichotomy of Science and Humanities. In terms of any program of education, chemistry has more in common with mathematical economics than does history. But the General Education program established categories based upon the Western heritage and tradition, and in order to treat the sciences in the same way as the other fields, the trichotomy was necessary.
For purposes of teaching, there are three critical differences between sciences and humanities. Science tends to be much more concerned with the ordering and manipulation of information than with the information to be handled, while the humanities tend to be rather more concerned with the portion of history, the system of philosophy, or the period of literature under discussion. Science tends to be entirely preoccupied with the present, while the humanities is built upon a concern for works of the past--the concern of a physicist with Newton has almost nothing in common with the concern of an English scholar with Shakespeare. And in science, truth is single, there is only one correct answer to a question, whereas in the humanities there are many answers to all but the most trivial questions.
Method of Ideas
It is the scientist's concern with the handling of information, with scholarly method, that may be most important in the Doty committee's thinking, for there have been suggestions that the committee should recommend a program for all of General Education almost exclusively devoted to the methods of scholarship. Scientists have always been convinced that method was the most important part of their The scientist's concern with the present, with experimental evidence, and with codifying laws, is antithetical to a classically oriented program of General Education. When a scientist is concerned with the history of science, that history is extracurricular; the test of an economic theorem, a psychological law, or a chemical equation is its validity, not its history. A continual complaint in courses in the Humanities is that grading does not allow differences of opinion or interpretation--does not allow for the fact that truth in the humanities is plural. But in the sciences such a criticism is almost comically irrelevant. But it is also the singular character of scientific truth that lies behind what is widely referred to as a "science block." 'Cliffies Don't Pass The number of students who seemingly cannot pass a course in the sciences is not overwhelming, but it is astonishingly substantial, particularly at Radcliffe. For many years there was a myth that this stemmed from an inability to do mathematics, which was a narrower sort of problem. But as courses in the Natural Sciences have become more rigorous and less historically oriented, it has become clear that there are many undergraduates who cannot pass a science course at all. Natural Sciences 5 is almost entirely non-mathematical, but those who were not good at science found the course exceedingly difficult. The Social Relations Department has seen glimmerings of the same problem in its efforts to teach students something about rigorous experimental design. A science course can be taught without serious mathematics. Certainly mathematics illuminates much of science, just as physics illuminates chemistry, but the separation can be made. The success of a magazine as Scientific American is extremely revealing in this regard. But looking at the readers of Scientific American, or the students who enjoyed and did well in Natural Sciences 5 leaves a considerable doubt whether these non-mathematical sciences are comprehensible to those who lack mathematical ability. Conversely, it looks very much as if those who come to understand science by studying its history understand it rather well before they start. Scientific Unity George Wald described the aim of General Education in science very simply: "To show you that you live in a lawful universe." The unity and integrity of scientific law can be seen in any field that accepts the singularity of scientific truth and the v But this does not resolve the problem of General Education. Separately, the Western tradition and the teaching of science are very different approaches to General Education. But together they are the warp and woof of a program directed at contemporary Western civilisation. The Doty Committee must decide whether Harvard should be loyal to the fabric of General Education and whether the precepts that Conant stated 21 years ago are as significant today. It was easy to ask for loyalty to the great traditions of Western civilisation and to talk of educating for citizenship, in the midst of a World War, Harvard's program was born on the crest of an intellectual wave which rose at Chicago and Columbia--it was not a pioneering and daring venture. When every national spokesman looks to the colleges as training grounds for specialists, and when the National Merit Scholarship Corporation proclaims that, "Talent is our most important national resource," General Education is a less popular rallying point. Within a community of scholars, it is difficult to say that scholarship is not sufficient training for a citizen of a free country, or to remind the Faculty of Conant's dictum that a liberal education is not necessarily a general education. It is not always easy to remember that "non-departmental" and "General Education" are imperfect synonyms. Scholarship and Education What was centrally important in General Education was the assertion that the academic programs of scholarship were not enough. One may argue that a program designed to immerse the student in Western civilization is not the best way to produce a citizes, but the Doty Committee would have a responsibility to produce an argument as closely reasoned as that which supports study of the literary, social and philosophical roots of Western culture. If a science-and-humanities program is to emerge, it must be tighter and more rigorous than the contemporary offering. Even as it separates the teaching of science and of Western culture, it must focus intensively upon each. Harvard's traditional tolerance for diversity must not again be allowed to reduce the program into placing its aegis over every non-departmental course that has the mark of quality. It would be easier to write such a program clearly by dividing into science and humanities than by trying to preserve the present categories. It is not really possible to defend any program of General Education in a In many ways, it is unfortunate that the committee consists exclusively of members of Harvard's academic family, for studies as broad as Doty's must be will prompt many to reflect that education may be too important to be entrusted to scholars. But this thought is relevant because it measures the Doty Committee's obligations, not as a criticism before the fact. None of the tensions between sciences are absolute, but they tend to force the General Education program to exist in one world or the other. That choice must not be made: the program must exist in both, and if possible it must serve as a bridge. This it must do not because there are two cultures but because the falterings of the science program and the diffusion of the humanities offerings has shown the overwhelming difficulty of the conflict. The solution is not simply to give the problem back to the departments and announce that attempting a solution was unwise
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