When the Doty Committee was appointed to study the state of General Education at Harvard, it faced an obvious but complex problem: Could it make both coherent and strong a program of General Education which was beset by confused and somewhat contradictory purposes, bedeviled by out-of-date requirements, and beleaguered by the departments that continually frustrated attempts to lure Faculty members into the program? Last May, when the report was released, the decision became apparent; the Doty Committee had emphasized strength not coherence, had been pragmatic and political but not philosophical.

The Committee addressed itself most creatively to the enfeebled health of the Gen Ed administration, specifically the inability to attract professors to teach Gen Ed and the difficulty in finding men to staff the courses. Consequently, the most radical sections of the report asked for a significant rearmament of the administrative structure. But if the Committee pragmatically faced administrative problems, it sloughed over or slighted important questions of definition and purpose with political deftness.

Aware of the pressing need for strengthening Gen Ed, the Committee has either left definitions innocuously vague or appeased opposing factions by adopting contradictory compromises, in both cases to avoid controversy and pass problems on to the new Committee on General Education for solution. But we think these problems should be debated--now.

Specifically, however right the report is about administrative reform, its first responsibility should have been to redefine the goals of General Education and explain the means for attaining them. But it is here that the report does not confront its task with sufficient candor and commits two errors, one of omission, one of commission.

* OMISSION--Broadly, in discussing the aims of Gen Ed, the Doty report has to a large extent formalized the existing, confused structure. It has failed to define what a Gen Ed course should be and do, to confront a basic problem plaguing the present program: How does one differentiate between a Gen Ed course and an introductory departmental offering?

* COMMISSION--Secondly, the report, in its discussion of the means for attaining the goals of General Education, has set up a contradiction. The Committee hopes to include more areas of knowledge in the new program, it wants students to have wide experience outside their own field of concentration, but also it hopes undergraduates will pursue certain Gen Ed topics in depth through course sequences. In short, the Doty Committee wants students to cover a wide range of topics but also wants them to pursue special interests in depth at the same time. Without increasing the total Gen Ed requirement beyond the present number (six plus Gen Ed Ahf), these contradictory goals are impossible to attain.

* * *

THE FAILURE OF DEFINITION: One of the central problems facing the Doty Committee when it was formed two years ago was the need to redefine a program of General Education that had fallen into increasing disarray since it had been proposed in 1945. In a college which views a liberal arts education as two-pronged, general and departmental, it was clearly the role of the college (through the Committee on General Education) to give students an antidote for the pressures of narrow specialization and premature professionalism. But, although there has always been broad agreement on the need for a nondepartmental program, what that program would do has never been precisely clear.

In 1945, the "Redbook," General Education in a Free Society, defined a "general" education as one that was "shared" (students would take the same lower level courses) and "philosophical" (the content of the courses would be concerned with the historic themes of Western civilization). But in the last nineteen years the word general as shared and philosophical has become almost meaningless; students do not have to take a core of offerings but instead have some choice, and the themes of the West are only part of a program which emphasizes methodology as much as historical content, quantitative analysis as much as an appreciation of the qualitative values of our past. Moreover, the broad explosion of knowledge in the past two decades with a corresponding trend towards specialized, highly technical research has been the force that has put General Education at Harvard out of joint.

In response to this challenge, the Doty Committee has proposed three aims for the refurbished Gen Ed program: In summary form, it is the task of Gen Ed

1. To give the student an appreciation of the civilization of which he is a part.

2. To make him aware of different fields and methods of inquiry.

3. To encourage a broader view of the potentialities and limitations of his own specialty.

It is precisely this definition which we find distressingly inadequate.

In essence, the redefinition of General Education only formalizes the somewhat confused system which exists today, a system which includes both historical (1) and methodological (2) approaches and which gives a student perspective on his own field of concentration by requiring him to take courses in other areas (3). General Education is to a degree defined negatively--it is not departmental education.