3. It is a responsibility of General Education to give the student a more philosophic perspective on his own field of specialization.

In summary form, it is the task of General Education to give the student an appreciation of the civilization of which he is a part, to make him aware of different fields and methods of inquiry, and to encourage a broader view of the potentialities and limitation of his own specialty....

The attempt, however, has been to single out certain particularly important objectives which (a) have clear relevance for a student's liberal education, and (b) are not adequately met by the mastery of some particular field of knowledge. In the committee's view, each of the propositions above meets these conditions. Together, they describe a major area of responsibility for a General Education Program....

III

Problems in the Present Program

After a detailed examination of the operations of the present General Education Program, the committee came to the conclusion that there were three major areas of difficulty involved: (a) the present administrative structure seems inadequate to the task of providing a major, required program of Harvard College; (b) General Education requirements have been too inflexible to take into account the varying levels of student preparation, and the courses offered have been too limited in number; and, finally (c), the content of the present Program is so organized that it either underemphasizes or omits some of the most vigorous areas of modern thought.

Problem of Administration

The difficulties of administering and staffing a non-departmental program in a strongly departmentalized university are well known. In the particular case of the Committee on General Education, which is empowered to run the Harvard General Education Program, the problem is twofold.

In the firstplace, the Committee on General Education has not been given adequate responsibility for many aspects of the curriculum that directly affect the General Education effort ....It seemed to us that the Committee on General Education should have a special responsibility not only for General Education courses but for all areas outside a student's field of concentration. This might include certain of the Freshman Seminars, the Advanced Standing Program, required composition, language and other general requirements, perhaps the potential uses of new facilities in the dramatic and visual arts.

At the present time, the Committee on General Education has little or no responsibility in such matters. They are mainly handled by separate committes or included among the several responsibilities of the Committee on Educational Policy.

The results of this fragmentation are (a) that no group in the Faculty has the responsibility or incentive to look at the problems of nondepartmental education at Harvard in a hard, continuing way, and (b) that none of the competing committees in this area has anything like the power or clear-cut organization of the several departments.

And this leads to the second part of the problem, which is that the Committee on General Education, unlike the departments, lacks an effective and systematic means of securing a faculty and staff. The General Education Program is basically a dependent program....

Requirements and Offerings

A second major problem in the present program has to do with the design of requirements and offerings, particularly at the "elementary" level....

Yet the problem is not created by the material--General Education courses are potentially enormously challenging to both faculty and students--but by the particular design of our Program. Three features of this design seem especially unfortunate: