This program, drawn up at the instigation of Giles Constable '50, associate professor of History, as an alternative to the Doty Committee Report, will be introduced at today's Faculty meeting. 22 Faculty members had a hand in its drafting, although no all of them support all of its provisions. In addition to Constable they are Rogers G. Albritton, professor of Philosophy; Bernard Bailyn, professor of History; Walter Jackson Bate, Abbott Lawrence Lowell Professor of the Humanities; Garrett Birkhoff, professor of Pure and Applied Mathematics; Reuben Brower, professor of English; Brice Chalmers, Gordon McKay professor of Metallurgy; J. Peterson Elder, Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences; H. Stuart Hughes, professor of History; Carl Kaysen, Lucius N. Littauer Professor of Political Economy; Mrs. Wilma Kerby-Miller, Academic Vice-President of Radcliffe; Harold C. Martin, Lecturer on Comparative Literature; Robert G. McCloskey, professor of Government; Edwin E. Moise, James Byrant Conant Professor of Education and Mathematics; Leonard K. Nash, Professor of Chemistry; Francis M. Rogers, professor of Romance Languages and Literatures; Arthur Smithies, Nathaniel Ropes Professor of Political Economy; George Wald, professor of Biology; Edward T. Wilcox, Director of Advanced Standing; Morton G. White, professor of Philosophy; and Robert Lee Wolff, professor of History.

The following proposals have been drawn up in the belief that at the present stage of the debate over General Education, it is necessary to consider some alternative to the plan presented in the report of the committee chaired by Professor Doty. We have assumed on the basis of the votes already taken in the Faculty that the General Education program will include an offering of General Education courses and a requirement to take some courses (but not necessarily General Education courses) outside the department of concentration. In order to work out a set of rules to put such a program into effect, we have broken down the problem into a series of questions. To each of these we have proposed an answer. A glance at these will give the reader a quick idea of the sort of requirements we have in mind. The entire proposal does not depend upon any single answer, however, and each question should be considered separately:

(1) the number of courses required outside the field of concentration,

(2) the division of courses into areas (as distinct from fields or departments),

(3) the distribution of the courses outside the field of concentration,

(4) the type of course required outside the field of concentration,

(5) when these must be taken.

(1) In both the existing program and that proposed in the Doty Report, students are required to take six courses (twelve half-courses), in various combinations, to satisfy the General Education requirements. In practice this adds up to no more than four courses outside the area of the department of concentration. Since in fact some distribution within the area of concentration is more or less assured by the fact that many departments require, and nearly all allow, their concentrators to take some courses related to their field, the purpose of the requirement could be achieved, and its administration simplified, by ruling that:

(2) We are of the opinion that the division into three areas (possibly renamed Humanities, Sciences, and Social Studies) should be kept in place of the two-area division proposed in the Doty Report.

(3) The distribution of the required courses outside the area of concentration raises in effect the question of a science requirement, since experience shows that whereas science majors are usually happy to take courses outside their area, non-scientists are often reluctant to take any science. If the division into three areas and the requirement of four courses outside the area of concentration are accepted, the alternatives before the Faculty are to permit a free distribution (thus allowing students to take all four courses in only one outside area or to require either one or two courses in each area. We believe that the wisest plan is that:

Thus a student may divide his four "outside' courses either two-and-two or three-and-one and can, if he wishes, pursue his interests in one area more deeply than in the other.

(4) The knottiest problem before the Faculty is the type of courses which will fulfill the General Education requirement. Four possible solutions have been suggested:

(A) to allow students to satisfy the requirement by any courses in the Catalogue (excepting elementary language courses and Air, Naval, and Military Science), duly divided into areas (the Constable proposal), perhaps with the proviso, suggested by Professor Birkhoff, that students were expected, but not required, to meet the requirement with courses labelled General Education.

(B) to limit the courses by which a student may fulfill the requirement to a list of what will be called here "designated" courses, including both General Education and some departmental courses (the Brower proposal).

(C) to allow more credit in meeting the requirement to General Education than to departmental courses, either on a 1-to-15 or on a 1-to-2 ratio: thus a student could meet the requirement by taking either one-and-a-half or twice as many departmental as General Education courses (the Kaysen proposal).