Other statistics suggest that the feeling is mutual. Studies made for the Doty Committee indicate that where-as science students take a healthy number of courses outside their area, many undergraduates in the Humanities and Social Sciences take only the barest minimum of science courses-- i.e. one.--during their four years at Harvard. The major reason for this is not lack of interest in science but the lack of suitable course offerings in the Harvard catalogue, and, one suspects, the shortage of scientists communicative enough to meet the challenge of addressing the non-specialists.

Loss of Zeal

The appointment of a respected chemist to chair the present committee is recognition that it is among-scientists that the Gen Ed program most needs a new mandate. But the spiritual energy of the original program has run down elsewhere too. Conceived at the peak of the war effort, the Redbook was drafted with a sense of democratic mission that has since become dated.

One could catch an allusion to the college of the German universities in President Conant's charge to the original Redbook Committee in 1943: "Neither the mere acquisition of information nor the development of special skills and talents can give the broad basis of understanding which is essential if our civilization is to be preserved." "Our purpose, is to cultivate in the largest possible number of our future citizens an appreciation of both the responsibilities and benefits which come to them because they are Americans and are free."

Today's academics feel uncomfortable with such rhetoric. Conant himself has gone off to write books urging American high schools to give less education for democracy and more vocational training. The sense of re-building, of urgency, of making a fresh start has been lost since the war, and the ringing phrases which expressed it, however fresh they may still seem to politicians in the nation's capital, are taking a rest among the professors at Harvard. A revised Gen Ed program will have to draw its inspiration from a more timely, more fashionable, more cautious ideal.

A Modest Approach

The Doty Committee has accordingly proceeded less ambitiously than

The Doty Committee

Paul M. Doty, Professor of Chemistry, Chairman

Bernard Bailyn, Professor of History

Paul H. Buck, Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor and Director of the University library

John H. Finley, Jr., Eliot Professor of Greek Literature and Master of Eliot House

Richard T. Gill, Assistant Professor of Economics, Master of Leverett House Leo Goldberg, Higgens Professor of Astronomy

Gerald Holton, Professor of Physics

John U. Monro, Dean of Harvard College