David D. Perkins, Associate Professor of English

chairman of the Redbook committee

member of the Redbook committee its predecessor. Whereas the original committee consulted with over 80 educators from colleges, universities, secondary schools, labor unions and industry; the present committee has largely limited its interviews to the Gen Ed "shop," i.e. to those concerned with administering the program at Harvard. Whereas the Redbook Committee published a 267-page volume addressed to a national audience, the Doty Committee thinks more in terms of a fifty-page pamphlet which, though it may be of interest to other colleges, will be written largely-in Harvardspeak. And, whereas the 1945 committee prescribed changes in curriculum without reference to actual classroom conditions, the new group has commissioned empirical studies of patterns of course selection among Harvard undergraduates.

The Doty Committee, in sum, has abandoned the Messianic preoccupation with "universal" General Education and narrowed its attention to-everyday problems at Harvard. The theme of its final report will surely not be, as a distinguished reviewer once said of the Redbook, that "Harvard Wants to Join America" but rather that "Harvard Wants to Mind Its Own Business." Instead of saving Western Democracy the Doty Committee has a more modest aim: the preservation of Harvard College and the cultivation of a new, more-up-to-date version of the liberally educated man.

Preserving The College

No, the College is not collapsing: the $82 million Program for Harvard College has assured its financial security; the House system since 1930 has guaranteed its residential integrity; the prestige of the institution has lately enabled it to choose its students from among some of the most highly qualified applicants in the country. Still Harvard College is threatened, not with extinction but with loss of identity in the midst of an encroaching University.

The friction between Harvard College and Harvard University was a major concern of the Redbook, a concern, which might have been the dominant one had the war not intervened. In the late Thirties Harvard students and faculty were expressing increasing dissatisfaction with the role of "specialism" in the College. Several Student Council reports which were later endorsed by the Dean of the College deplored the effects of the free elective system which had been introduced by President Eliot in the latter half of the nineteenth century to initiate Harvard into the research activities of the German universities. As the importance of specialism grew, the elective system went in opposition to the British tradition of individualized undergraduate education that had marked Harvard since its founding and seemed to be reducing the College to a preparatory wing of the graduate schools.

During the Thirties strongly worded criticisms of the elective system also came from the University of Chicago, which had pioneered a program of General Education based on "great books" and installed a special faculty to teach the new undergraduate courses. Robert M. Hutchins, Chicago's Chancellor, branded Mr. Mr. Eliot a "great criminal...who applied his genius, skill and longevity to the ask of robbing American youth of their cultural heritage." Similar sentiments could be heard at Harvard when the war broke out and gave an urgent tone to the criticism of Germanic specialism. But though the war influenced the tone of the Redbook, it had nothing to do with the writers' faith in a liberal education, in the value of a purely collegiate educational experience. The great gift of the 1945 committee to Harvard, then, was not its missionary zeal but its establishment of a program for perpetuating instruction in the non-professional side of education.

Position of Strength

The Gen Ed program was not merely a temporary measure to redressing the balance between College and University it gave Harvard an administrative weapon which might be used whenever the College was in danger of losing its support. As John U. Monro, Dean of the College, recently put it, "a soundly conceived program of General Education can become . . . the central position of the central position of strength from which the whole college--president, dean, faculty members--coming together in the name of the college,--can, quite simply do those things for its students which ought to be done, but which we know will not get done if instruction is left entirely to the departments."

Post-war developments have made this "position of strength" particularly valuable. The natural inclination of the departments to ignore the special problems of undergraduate education has been encouraged by the social demand for specialists as reflected in government research grants, foundation support, and even in the aspirations of the undergraduates themselves. More than eighty per cent of Harvard's students now go on to graduate study. As a result the Harvard community has become increasingly fragmented. The deans of the various graduate schools have assumed new importance and power, independent enclaves of specialized study have grown up within the university community (e.g. the three regional research centers, the center for International Affairs, the Cambridge Electron Accelerator, the various economics research projects). In Cambridge as in other university towns, the new rule is each man to his own tent.

Since the College remains as the the only part of the University which cuts across the various academic fiefs, an administrator anxious to draw together the many parts of Harvard may begin by strengthening the College, and within the College by fortifying the Gen Ed program. For along with the House system, Gen Ed is one of Harvard's two purely "collegiate" programs.

The Doty Committee has by now agreed that Gen Ed should be clarified and strengthened. It has, for example, discussed administrative measures for solving the recruitment problem, including putting the Dean of the Faculty or President of the University in charge of Gen Ed and giving the Gen Ed program various kinds of leverage to pry professors and teaching fellows away from their departments.

The committee has also examined the interrelation of Gen Ed with other non-departmental programs to determine whether any one can be combined under a unified administration. It has considered altering the present Gen Ed requirements, such as making Gen Ed optional for some students, and two years of Nat Sci courses required for others.

The introduction of various multiple options to make the Gen Ed requirements more sensitive to differences individual interests and levels of preparation has been discussed.