They are dissatisfied with the style of graduate school life, and feel stifled by the overemphasis on theory or facts which seem irrelevant to their social conscience and wider human interests. Students want to be lawyers and architects and economists while they are students, to live the discipline rather than study it.

It is difficult to imagine that Harvard's graduate and professional schools ever produced students over-whelmingly content with their education. In the past they expressed their dissatisfaction with post-graduate studies in general malaise, specific criticisms, or just plain bitching. Yet because the students felt this dissatisfaction was private and personal, they rarely communicated their discontent effectively to fellow students or to the faculty and administration of their schools. Since early 1966, however, Harvard graduate students have brought their complaints into the open.

Criticism of post-graduate education has taken many forms, and clearly reflects the different conditions at Harvard's various schools. Notable examples of student discontent and active agitation for reform can be found at the Medical School, the School of Education, the Law School, the Graduate School of Design, and within the Department of Economics in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Each student reform group built its case on specific issues, but it also seems clear that Harvard graduate students share general concerns.

Quality

Their overriding interest is in the quality of their own education. Much of the student dissatisfaction focuses on three issues. Students specifically question the value of required curricula -- the relevance of courses to problems and practice in the real world, as well as the quality and method of the teaching itself. Secondly, they seek a closer and more significant relationship with the faculty. The desire for a collegial community of scholars, teaching and learning from each other, motivates many of the demands for reform. And finally, students assert that they should play a larger role in determining the educational and administrative policies of their schools.

These three general concerns focus on improving the process of postgraduate education. The actual reform movements of the past two years attest to the fact that students do have something worthwhile to say about this process.

The Med School

In January of 1966, twenty-five second-year students at Harvard Medical School, frustrated by the lecture system which makes up the bulk of the second year curriculum, petitioned their dean for the privilege of studying the course material independently. Dean Ebert granted the petition, though the number of actual participants dropped from twenty-five to five. Those five still feel that the experiment was a personal success, although they may have scored lower on the minutely detailed final exams than did the bulk of their class.

The experiment was not continued this year and the impetus for student-directed innovation in the pre-clinical years seems to have died. Instead, a faculty committee has taken up the broader question of curriculum reform and has issued recommendations which could dramatically reshape the Medical School system.

Dean Ebert appointed this group as a subcommittee of the faculty Curriculum Committee. The critical debate initiated by the second-year experiment undoubtedly encouraged the Dean to begin an investigation of long-needed reforms. The committee, led by Dr. Alexander Leaf, worked over the summer and submitted its report to the faculty last fall. The members tried to re-assess what a medical school should be teaching its students, and questioned the wisdom of allowing each medical department to offer a required course which burdens the student with perhaps irrelevant facts and details. The members recognized that students had differing needs and interests which the school might try to meet.

The subcommittee report recommends that broad interdepartmental courses be substituted for the department requirements, courses which will teach the student a method of acquiring medical knowledge and provide him with a general background of essential information. Departments would offer specialized electives to deal with specific problems in depth, the workload of requirements would be lessened, new courses would be offered, and professors would be given a chance to teach small groups.

The Medical School faculty has discussed this report at monthly meetings throughout the year. The recommendations have met with stiff opposition from hospital doctors who teach the two clinical years, and from professors who fear the loss of power and autonomy by the departments. Other faculty claim that the Medical School, as a professional school, should not attempt to offer the flexibility of an academic graduation education. The subcommittee report, if not delayed indefinitely, might emerge from the faculty in a watered-down form which would institute meaningless changes. Attempts at reform by small groups of students and faculty seem stifled by outspoken commitment to the status quo among their fellows.

The Ed School

At the School of Education, this commitment is not stifling, but the students observe a substantial inconsistency between the goals which the school espouses and the educational process by which these goals are supposedly attained. The Ed School, in accord with the purposes outlined in the Scheffler Report of 1965, proclaims its commitment to training excellent educators who will also be agents of social change. Students accept this goal, but feel that their education is not living up to it.

The voices of discontent claim that students suffer from gaps in the curriculum, from boring and conventional teaching methods, and from the lack of an effective voice in school policy decisions. Dissatisfaction came to a head in February of 1966 when several ad hoc groups formed to agitate for specific reforms. A group of thirty students asked for two supplementary non-credit seminars on group process and social change, and their request was granted by Dean Sizer. A smaller group began its own study of the problems of urban education, a crucial area which they felt the school was ignoring.