What the Supreme Court does periodically for American law and the Party Congresses do for the development of Soviet Marxism, and what the Ecumenical Council is in the midst of doing for the Catholic Church was last effected at Harvard College in 1945 when the Faculty Committee on "The Objectives of General Education in a Free Society" published its final report.

Like the other august bodies, the Committee was summoned to adapt doctrine and practice to new conditions, or as President Conant put it in his charge to the group in 1943, to assure "the continuance of the liberal and humane tradition." And though the Committee's findings were in no sense regarded as supreme pronouncements, they did much to set the terms of curriculum debate among college and secondary school educators. In the style of its Soviet counterpart the Faculty Committee suggested a new "line" for thought on education; in a more down-to-earth American tradition it was careful to tie all ideological utterances to concrete problems and practicable recommendations; and in the best ecumenical spirit it included among its members eminent scholars representing a cross-section of academic disciplines.

The result of the Committee's deliberations, the well-known "Red-book" on General Education in a Free Society, is one of the few publications in the history of the Harvard Press to have sold more than 50,000 copies. Outside of Cambridge it is still read. At Harvard it has unobtrusively become the basis for discussion of college curriculum on both the theoretical and working levels. By the weight of its influence the colorless phrase General Education has been established as the slogan under which some of the most pressing issues of college policy are examined.

A Barometer to the College

Harvard people, in fact, have come to think of a liberal education as consisting of two parts: "departmental" and "general." Departmental instruction, provided by the various fields of concentration, is that which teaches discipline, thoroughness, and command of a given method and limited body of information. General education, by contrast, is addressed not to the specialist but to the intelligent outsider. "Its approach," as the undergraduate Committee on Educational Policy recently put it, "deviates from the scholarly in that its aim is not principally scholastic or even analytic but speculative.

"Above all, Gen Ed is meant to serve as a powerful loosening force on a student's intellectual timidity--a timidity too often reinforced by the acquired pedantries of concentration. ...It can allow his mind to range over an enormous variety of possible human actions and alternatives in a way that no departmental course can do without losing its rigor."

General Education has thus become a catch phrase for that part of the Harvard curriculum which is "collegiate," which does not even attempt to imitate the comprehensive standards of specialized study. On the working level it concerns itself with the question of what courses in the Humanities, Natural Sciences and Social sciences Harvard undergraduates should be required to take in addition to their course for concentration. On the theoretical level it is concerned with the ancient and lofty question of the aims and meaning of a college education.

Since Gen Ed combines all kinds of considerations--philosophical administrative, pedagogic, and even budgetary--it is a sensitive barometer to the atmosphere of Harvard College. A by change in the college will be signalled by a change in Gen Ed.

Administrative Disarray

It was therefore a noteworthy event when in the fall of 1962 Franklin Ford, the new Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, appointed the eminent chemist Paul M. Doty to chair a committee to reexamine the Gen Ed program. Ford's action was a sign that the evolution of the college over the past 20 years has thrown General Education into disarray and again brought into question the purposes of undergraduate education at Harvard.

Administratively, the Gen Ed program has gone out of joint as a result of non-departmental programs which have impinged upon its authority and functions. The sophomore standing program now permits ten percent of each entering class to skip the freshman year and, incidentally, to dispense with a large portion of the Gen Ed requirement. The Advanced Standing program, which this year involved 40 per cent of the freshman class, weakens Gen Ed still more by giving students college credit for subjects outside their field of concentration. The Freshman Seminar program, in which more than one-fourth of this year's freshmen were enrolled, further invades the province of General Education, often by exempting students from Gen Ed A, the English composition course. Then there are the Independent Study and House Seminar Programs, two non-departmental activities which were partially inspired by Gen Ed and fulfill part of its function. Finally there is the problem of staffing Gen Ed courses that has become particularly acute in the Natural Sciences.

The Nat Sci Problem

The difficulty in getting scientists to teach elementary Gen Ed courses is an intensified version of the recruitment problem in other fields. Teaching a Gen Ed course involves a total commitment to non-specialized undergraduate education, a commitment which all departments have good reasons not to embrace. The natural intellectual momentum of an academic department carries it to the frontiers of knowledge in its field and tends to make departmental courses "pre-professional" programs to initiate the student into the most recent discoveries. The same momentum drives professors to seek satisfaction outside the Harvard community. Certainly more prestige (and often more money) is attached to advising leaders in government and industry or to chairing a section of the American Association for the Advancement of Science than to teaching a first-rate course to Harvard undergraduates. "In physics," Gerald Holton says, "many of us spend an average of one or two days a month out of the country, not to mention the time spent outside of Cambridge. The center of gravity of faculty loyalty is shifting away from Harvard Square to wherever one's professional concerns may lead."

For the scientist outside professional concern are apt to be more interesting. A humanities lecturer may on occasion present the results of fresh researches to freshmen; but in the Natural Sciences only graduate school courses are "creative" for the teacher. Untrained undergraduates and scientists simply do not speak the same language.

But it is also true that scientists at Harvard have in the past been willing to teach their language only to future specialists. Few professors and fewer untenured personnel can be coaxed into taking a year or two off from the race for government grants to bridge the gap between the Two Cultures. This year, for instance, there were only two advanced Gen Ed courses given in the area of the Natural Sciences, as compared with eleven in the Social Sciences and nine in the Humanities. The statistic suggests that scientists feel they have nothing tell the intelligent outsider.