The planning students formed the Harvard Association of Planners (HAP) in March of 1967. They specifically wanted to gain representation on important faculty committees. It seemed clear that students could contribute to the Building Committee's planning for the Design School's new center. Students also wanted to be able to express their opinion on crucial curriculum and requirement changes which the Department often seemed to spring on them. A constitution for the group was approved by the planning students in March, a discussion series held by the HAP became a popular success, and Dean Sert granted permission for two students to join the Building Committee.
Students made their most effective showing before the Visiting Committee from the Board of Overseers in April. An ad hoc committee, with members from all Design departments, had gathered student criticisms and suggested reforms into a well-reasoned and comprehensive assessment of the school. Such a longterm analysis had never before been presented by the students, and the Visiting Committee was impressed with the display of organization and consensus.
The HAP has since requested that agendas for meetings of the Administrative Council and the Curriculum Committee be published so that they might request representation in certain discussions. The Association will publish a course evaluation book in the fall to provide for joint student-faculty evaluation of the curriculum.
Design students, and especially the planners, are pleased with their successful organization and their initial attempts to increase student-faculty interaction. But the faculty is still hedging on the question of allowing students in on policy decisions, and the long-term suggestions for reform still rest in the hands of the Administration and the Overseers.
A group of first-year students in Economics also began in March of this year to articulate the unhappiness and grumblings registered by individuals. After several weeks of discussion among themselves, the group presented a memorandum of complaints to the faculty which they felt represented half of the first-year class. The document criticized the overemphasis on rote theorems and proofs in two basic courses, complained that the faculty was inacessible and overly concerned with maintaining its research empire, and put in a plea for a more critical approach to the teaching of economics which might avoid blind acceptance of models and economic masters.
Common Issues
In general, these student movements for educational reforms in medicine, education, law, design and economics, diverse as they may seem, do share certain concerns and have advocated in common the issues of curriculum reform, increased faculty interaction, and participation in policy decisions. The activists seem motivated by the conviction that their opinions are not only relevant but important, and by the unwillingness to accept the educational process as a static system which they cannot question. Their gripes are no longer personal but public and well-articulated. Discussion is satisfying for a time, but it is action which they seek.
Reformers also share common problems. Conservative faculty response forces delays in student plans at best, and entirely thwarts reform at worst. Equally frustrating for the activists is the conservatism and apathy among their fellow students. They usually cannot claim to speak for a majority of their classmates, nor even reflect a climate of opinion. Law and medical students are satisfied with the system which will make them successful lawyers and doctors. Design students, in a small school which inevitably molds them into an intimate community through studio work, are perhaps best able to achieve a consensus of opinion. So while the activists are now more critical, vocal and well-organized, they remain essentially a minority.
Not Revolutionary
None of the reforms which these minorities have advocated are basically revolutionary. Only a few of the students might propose an overthrow of the entire post-graduate educational system. They would question the values which the system inevitably projects on the students, and scoff at the reverence in which society holds its products. Most of the graduate reformers reflect rather the concerns with power, with style and with participation which characterize many reform movements of the 1960's.
They know that power is to be achieved through organization and at the same time are learning how best to organize themselves. More important, they believe that power should be shared, not held in awe by those who happen not to have it.
Living the Discipline
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.
Finally, they assert that they have the right to participate in shaping the process which so shapes them. They suspect the Establishment of trying to thwart their innovative tendencies, they understand the corruptive effects of power, they believe they must participate in changing the system before it swallows them.
While many of the specific reforms they advocate may be tame, the philosophy they propagate is not. It will be significant if this philosophy, shared by youthful workers for Civil Rights, in the War on Poverty and within the Black Power movement, can be carried effectively into the graduate and professional schools -- the former bastions of secure traditionalism