When President Bok took office in 1971 there was much speculation, administrators say now, that he would commission a committee to draw up a comprehensive report on undergraduate education at Harvard. That report was never commissioned-partly because a newly appointed young president who had gone to Stanford couldn't hope for any success if he commissioned a group to override the Harvard Faculty on matters of education.

The timing wasn't right, either. Only two years earlier students had staged a sit-in at University Hall, an event that paralyzed and polarized the Faculty. There hadn't been enough time to heal the wounds, let alone talk about restructuring the College. And there was something else: two other Ivy League colleges, Yale and Princeton, were themselves undergoing self-scrutiny in the form of educational commissions, and it seemed logical to wait and see what they would produce.

Now things have changed. With the sense that the Faculty paralysis has at last subsided, Dean Rosovsky - one of the Faculty's own - has commissioned seven task forces to go forward with a comprehensive report on the next ten years of undergraduate education at Harvard. The task forces are empowered to make a series of recommendations-some broad, some nuts-and-bolts - for changes in the academic structure of the College.

But the wait-and-see process has not brought encouraging news-the reports on undergraduate education at Yale and Princeton left legacies of mostly failure, mixed with a modicum of success. Those results shed a considerable amount of light on what kind of results the task forces might obtain when they pass their general and specific recommendations to the Faculty in 1977.

Don't use the word 'mentor' if you want to reform undergraduate education at Yale

In April 1971, Yale President Kingman Brewster decided that Yale College badly needed "a coherant, purposive articulation of the goals of education at Yale." He asked Robert A. Dahl, a professor of Government, to chair a blue-ribbon committee of five faculty and administrators and produce "broad recommendations concerning the future of Yale College over the next 20 years."

One year later the Dahl report, a 117-page book filled with 60 recommendations about undergraduate education, was in the midst of being tabled by the Yale faculty. What happened between the christening and the collapse serves as a warning for others on the inherent dangers of giving committees broad mandates for educational reform. The failure of the Dahl report also points out the inherent logistics and timing problems in enterprises of this nature.

"What we had hoped the report would do at least was provide wide discussion," a disappointed Dahl says today about the report's performance. "It didn't even do that." What went wrong? Dahl's version portrays a faculty basically unreceptive to change and a student body that cared little either as the primary reasons for the dust that has since gathered on the report.

Some of the report's suggestions are just now being adopted, mostly in diluted forms and through other committees. But its major recommendations, particularly the bold "mentor plan," an elaborate residential college-run program that marched students with faculty tutors, have been forgotten. The impetus for the mentor program, Dahl says, was the need to change ineffective advising and counseling that students received. But Dahl says the plan, which would have provided 15 mentors per college ruffled the feathers of the faculty, who viewed it as "a threat to departmental programs" and as "raising the danger of declining standards of education at Yale."

Nancy Hoskins, secretary to the committee, remembers well the discussion on the mentor plan, which left her deeply disappointed about the possibilities for change. "It was the word 'mentor,'" she says. "'Mentor' just didn't go over well with the faculty. We even tried to discuss other words to call the program in committee because we thought something like this may happen. But we came up with nothing else new, and it hurt." Hoskins adds that the plan was a way to get more faculty-student interaction, but it was seen as a criticism of the current system of advising.

The faculty greeted the report - particularly its mentor recommendations - with "massive indifference," Hoskins remembers. If anything, only a small appendix note on a possible change in the lengths of the school term to save money caused any stir. But that stir was strong enough to distract the faculty from the other 117 pages of the Dahl Report. The appendix suggested that the school should remain open all year to try to increase tuition revenue without crowding classes. "The debate on the report waged on that appendix," William Kessen, Yale professor of psychology and committee member, recalls. Ironically, after all "that vigorous and negative response, we ended up adopting that calender in modified form," Kessen says.

The two biggest drawbacks to educational reform, the committee members assert, were the faculty's reluctance to change and its growing awareness that the school would not have the funds to carry out the major recommendations of the report. Worse, with the debate over the report's appendix came the understanding that not only could things not change for the better but that the status quo would have to be cut back and the number of faculty reduced. "The fact that Dahl didn't have the price tag for his recommendation injured us," Hoskins says. "They told us originally that we shouldn't be bounded by finances, but it was finances that inevitably took all the attention away from the report's major recommendations.

"If I had it to do over again," Dahl says now, "I would include some students." He says without student views the report lacked important. Also, Dahl says he was disturbed by the dearth of alumni comment, which could only be remedied by an improvement in Yale's communications with its alumni.

Kessen says that the report got too bogged down on the specifies of change. He said the attention spent on the summer plan was a setback-a sidelight ended up dominating the report's wealth of academic recommendations.

To Hoskins, the drawbacks of the report were its timing and lack of promotion. The university had just discovered that because of economic conditions, it couldn't do whatever it wanted any more, she says. One of the discussions the report sparked was over the university's skyrocketing fuel oil bills, she adds.

"A lot depends entirely on the implementation process," Hoskins says, "The faculty needed a hard sell for a lot of our points and it is not my impressions they got one. We ended up selling it to colleagues who had not yet confronted the budget crisis, and the report seemed like bad news to them."

She says a series of student interview sessions that were not well attended seriously damaged the committee's work, and without students the committee lost an important lobby with the faculty. When the report was forgotten by the fall of 1972, students and faculty forgot it together, she says.

"Other schools now call us and ask us to please send us a copy of your wonderful report. But nobody from Yale asks us," Hoskins says.

Bold and radical change

shot down at Princeton

Princeton took a similar course. There in 1970 former president Robert F. Goheen established a Commission on the Future of the College with the general mandate to conduct a "major review of undergraduate education at Princeton." Goheen appointed Marvin Bressler, Professor of Sociology, to chair a 19-member committee of ten faculty members, six undergraduates and three administrators to deliver a "reappraisal of the entire undergraduate program in order that we may better anticipate and control the future."

Initially the Princeton report was greeted with an even more devastating response than the Dahl report at Yale. Delivering his own preliminary report in 1971, recommending radical changes in the structure of the college including a three-year B.A., Bressler was shot down by both student and faculty opposition before a vote could be taken. "It lost totally, there was no sentiment for it," Bressler says about the original report.

A discouraged Bressler then went back to committee and emerged two years later with a new 252-page report that some members of the committee call considerably diluted from Bressler's originally bold recommendations. Neal Rudenstine, in the dean's office at Princeton and a member of the Bressler commission now calls that final report a success because a number of its recommendations were implemented, including a proposal for equal access admissions. "The report also provided us with an extraordinary inventory and assessment-it was very worth-while," Rudenstine says.

Daniel Seltzer, a Harvard professor of English for 15 years before going to Princeton and a member of the commission, says the later report was a success. Seltzer mentions, however, that some key provisions - including important changes in the academic calender, language requirement, and core curriculum - were killed because "a lot of important professors on campus were against" Of the debate on core curriculum Seltzer says, "more lobbying with the faculty could have been done before this recommendation was promulgated," to achieve better results.

If the report was a failure in any sense, Adele Simmons '63, dean of students at Princeton, Harvard Overseer, and a committee member, says it was only a failure of expectations. Simmons said there was a prevalent belief on campus that the Bressler Commission would come up with the definitive answers to major questions about the concept of higher education in the next 20 years. The report couldn't fulfill that function, she says.

The biggest problem that these types of reports run into, Rudenstine says, is that they promise more than they can deliver. "It's not clear that many things can be shifted in undergraduate education," Rudenstine says about the lack of great change coming out of the Bressler report. "I don't think you can turn something upside down. If you have a lot of dollars or if you are currently doing a lousy job then there may be something to recommend" Otherwise nothing may come of the report.

"Given the constraints, nothing dramatic happened from the report," Bressler says. "Nothing big came out of it, and from that standpoint it was a failure. The report's most salutary effect was that it created a dialogue on the purposes and adequacies of the college."

Although the degree of success of the report may be debatable, not one of the committee members interviewed had any regrets about undertaking the study. Most considered the report valuable at least for discussion and inventory purposes. It is very important to stop everything once in a while and evaluate the college and assess it, Simmons says today. "It is difficult to come up with a better alternative within the reasonable economic framework."

It Can't Happen Here

Harvard's attempt at examining undergraduate education hasn't reached the level yet where the implications of the Yale and Princeton reports can be felt. In fact, the committees, each of which had copies of the Yale and Princeton reports, have just begun examining those reports themselves.

Rosovsky has already started to tackle certain key questions regarding the focus of their reports. His decision to develop broad recommendations instead of the originally expected nuts-and-bolts suggestions has brought the task forces' reports into the same arena that submerged the Yale and Princeton reports. Most of the task force chairmen said last week that the majority of their recommendations will fall in the nut-and-bolts category - small, mostly administrative recommendations - that may not have to come before the Faculty. But James Q. Wilson, Shattuck Professor of Government and the chairman of the core curriculum task force, possibly the key group, said he expects his committee's work to have a broader, more philosophical mandate than the other task forces. "We won't have any necessarily more cosmic recommendations than others," Wilson insists. "But there is hardly a major proposal that would not have to be passed by the Faculty."

And it is at the faculty level that the principle lesson of the Yale and Princeton reports can be learned. Although Bressler himself was possibly the worst victim of faculty reaction against his first report, he cautions against bending a committee towards what the faculty may favor. "I don't think you ought to pre-judge" what the sentiment of the faculty is, he says.

Rudenstine, after his work with the Bressler committee, says that other committees like it need both nut-and-bolts and broad recommendations. Without a wide focus, he says, the committees become just inventory-takers, which isn't enough. Their role should be one of planning and providing for changes that would otherwise be implemented on a slower, more haphazard basis, he says.

Yale's Kessen acknowledges that the Harvard report faces the chance of being voted down, like it Yale counterpart, because of the unpredictable and usually conservative nature of the faculty. But he warns against worrying about the now, because "You start weakening your report when you start thinking about it. Can't be constrained by what the faculty will do. Speak to the needs of the College, and don't say platitudinous things."

Dahl is perhaps the most pessimistic about the outcome of reviews of undergraduate education. "In times of crisis," he warns, the crisis "may carry the program away. You may get turned into something as a consequence of the immediate. To some extent we were victims of crisis, which at the time turned out to be financial crisis, which deflected attention of the faculty away from long-term proposals."

Dahl says that a report on undergraduate education need a mix of philosophical elements and more procedural ones, but that in the end a faculty is moved by concrete, substantive recommendation. As for Rosovsky's task force scheme, Dahl says he sees advantages and disadvantages in it. On one hand, with seven task forces each topic will be taken up with a great deal of care - but at the same time there may be a "lack of a general overview of what the college could be doing" that stems from the study's diffusion.

"Basic structural or substantive changes are always difficult," Dahl warns, and because university faculties are by nature conservative, recommendations for broad change are usually doomed to failure. In the long run, a report here that is similar to the Yale committee's will probably lead to disappointment for its authors, Dahl says - a disappointment that is natural when you put in several years' work on a broad educational review that ends of gathering dust instead of momentum for change.