A LOT of strange events took place in the wake of the occupation and bust last spring. One of the strangest was that all sorts of Harvard people began to learn, and to enjoy learning, about issues that really mattered to them. In colloquiums, in bull sessions, in impromptu discussions on the street, people worked together on touchy and pressing problems. The strike brought a sense of liberation; it was hard to resist the excitement and euphoria.

With all this in mind, a group of undergraduates and teaching fellows created Harvard New College. We hoped to preserve the spirit of learning that emerged during the strike by exploring supplements and alternatives to traditional undergraduate education. We hoped that people would join us and help pressure Harvard into reforming its drastically archaic educational system.

Under the circumstances the New College got off to a relatively good start. By the middle of May, we had set up about thirty discussion groups. The group leaders ranged in academic status from professors to freshmen; their topics ranged from the "Philosophy of Wittgenstein" to the "Tapes of the Baba Ram Dass," and included a whole lot in between. Several hundred Harvard and Radcliffe students attended one or another of the groups before exam time rolled around. Many discovered a whole new dimension of meaning and excitement in these educational experiences.

The other, equally important activity of the New College last spring were its weekly "mass" meetings. There was a lot of administrative trivia to be taken care of scheduling the groups, distributing leaflets, etc. But the chief concerns weren't trivial at all. To develop a sense of common purpose (and to raise money), we had to work out a coherent critique of the existing educational system and to form some guidelines, however temporary, for our initial educational experiments. It wasn't easy.

THE RADICAL criticism that we all came more or less to adopt was not original. Paul Goodman, among others, had been saying some of the stuff for years. But our ideas did have the integrity of arising straight from experience.

We centered on the values of objectivity and efficiency as the primary illusions of modern university education. Everybody should admit by now that objectivity is a lost cause. You can't make a statement about the world without assuming, either implicitly or explicitly, the rightness or the goodness of certain values- and statements containing value-assumptions are by definition subjective, not objective. Intellectual knowledge does not exist in a moral vacuum- or in an ivory tower. Neither its discovery nor its application is carried out objectively.

(A contemporary example: the professor who would do research for the Cambridge Project- say, on mass movements in underdeveloped countries- couldn't help but go about it with opinions and preconceptions which would inevitably influence his results. He might assume that such knowledge is good in itself, regardless of how it would be used. Or he might assume that both the knowledge and its probable use are good and right. In any event, he'd be no more objective than the student who would protest his involvement with the Project.)

If objectivity is an illusion, then it will follow that the quest for efficiency is inimical to learning. Knowledge is essentially subjective: it cannot exist independently of the learner's (or knower's) perception. And it is in variably altered by that perception. Knowledge, in other words, is at best informed opinion. To pretend that learning is an efficient process of assimilating an external body of known truths, is to ignore the basic personal and moral aspects of learning and knowing.

From that point of view, grading- a sort of systems-analysis-efficiency-check-up- inhibits learning and thinking. From that point of view, the traditional modes of instruction- the lecture and the discussion class or section- are, in reality, un-educative processes. In lectures, a professor transmits the ideas and methods of his professional discipline as efficiently as possible to the students. But the students have no opportunity to think and question. This is often true of sections too, especially when the section leader has to "cover ground."

In any event, the section leader or professor is responsible for grading. And students, who are seeking a personal identity and a viable world-view, can hardly function within the narrow professional standards set by academic experts who lecture and grade them.

For the world-view many students seek must be in sharp contrast to the prevailing scientific world-view, which is enshrined in official educational epistemology and exalted in modern society. Today's education breeds the sort of scientific experts who can't abide ambiguity, or anything that won't yield to scientific explanation. There is great need for people to be exactly the opposite.

THAT, in brief, is the critique we worked out last spring in the New College meetings. Delivering it to you in a few quick paragraphs is as unfair as lecturing to students- you don't get any indication of the process by which we arrived at it. It is argued more persuasively, perhaps, in our prospectus. (A lengthy little document, now in its third revision, which practically no one at Harvard has ever seen because we've never typed it on stencils.) But you get the ideas for now.

Back to history. While we were refining our criticisms, we were also trying to answer the obvious question that arose from them: if traditional educational processes don't allow for meaningful learning, then what will?

We had a head start in the educational experiences of the strike. Also, a few New College people had been into encounter groups and sensitivity training, and some had been members of the Free University of Cambridge which operated in Winthrop House last year. It was clear from the start that our learning environments would have to be small, intense, cooperative groups. But we had to define them more clearly, at least to begin with, and we also had to define the function of the New College itself. Here are the provisional guidelines we eventually came up with (I've lifted them straight from the prospectus), along with explanations:

The New College will act as an educational clearing house in order to facilitate and encourage greater flexibility and scope in the university curriculum. Anyone can lead or participate in a group on any topic he chooses. The New College will schedule and publicize the group. If people show up, great; if not, too bad.