The following are excerpts from the 102-page report of the Special Committee to Review the Present Status and Problems of the General Education Program, released yesterday. Headed by Paul M. Doty, professor of Chemistry, the group also includes Bernard Bailyn, professor of History; Paul H. Buck, former dean of the Faculty; Mary I. Bunting, president of Radcliffe; John H. Finley, Jr. '25, Master of Eliot House and chairman of the Committee on General Education; Richard T. Gill '48, Master of Leverett House; Leo Goldberg '34, Higgins Professor of Astronomy; Dean Monro; and David D. Perkins '51, associate professor of English. Gerald Holton, professor of Physics, sat with the committee until his leave of absence began this Fall.

I

A Brief History

The Doty Committee begins its report with a brief history of the General Education Program at Harvard, This history ends with the following evaluation:

In attempting an over-all evaluation of this past history, the committee felt that the first statement should be one about achievements. We believe that the General Education Program has had substantial impact on Harvard and Radcliffe students and that this impact has been valuable in most instances.

The Program has been, as its original authors hoped, a substantial bulwark against overspecialization; it has provided our recent generation of students with a broad encounter with the fundamental forces and ideas that have shaped Western civilization; it has served as an important vehicle for a number of new and intellectually exciting courses which, either because of their interdisciplinary character or because of other special circumstances, did not fit beneath the umbrellas of particular departments; it has inspired a special enthusiasm in a small, dedicated group of faculty members who have thrown themselves wholeheartedly into this kind of teaching to the great benefit of their students....

II

Aims and Needs

As this committee understands the matter, the concept of a liberal arts college involves two central elements. The first has to do with the development in the student of a special competence and a sense of mastery over some particular area and method of knowledge. Such mastery is not, in the specific context of the liberal arts college, intended solely or even primarily as preprofessional training....

A student's field of concentration at Harvard may in fact become the foundation of his professional career, but this is not its basic purpose. In terms of liberal arts objectives, the main reason for having concentrations is the belief that mastery in one particular area will give the student a sense of what mastery in other areas involves and, in general, a deeper conception of the nature of knowledge and its implications for human experience.

Thus, at Harvard, work in a special field is conceived to have ramifications for a student's intellectual development outside his specialty. The department, when they offer fields of concentration, are thus understood to be fulfilling one major responsibility of a liberal education.

But there is also a second central element, and this is concerned not with the mastery of a particular field but with the problem of breadth across fields. Unfortunately, the term "breadth" is inadequate. It does not indicate specifically enough what the aims of General Education are. It also tends to convey the image of sweeping "survey" courses, the kind of course, indeed, against which the advocates of General Education at Harvard have so often arrayed themselves.

In reality, General Education has a multiplicity of objectives.... After much consideration of these matters, the committee came to the conclusion that there were three particular objectives which deserve explicit mention. These objectives are of vital concern in the present day. They are also objectives which are not typically satisfied by departmental programs and hence must be considered a special responsibility of General Education:

1. It is a responsibility of General Education to give all students a grounding in the historic intellectual, institutional, and cultural foundations of Western civilization.

2. It is a responsibility of General Education to acquaint the student with the substance of knowledge, and the method by which it is acquired, in fields other than his own.