One member of the task force, George F. Carrier, Coolidge Professor of Applied Mathematics, maintains that this "slightly anomalous" task force must wait until the other six have prepared their recommendations before it can make its final comments or report. This approach has angered at least one member, E. Scott Gilbert '76, who disagrees that the task force should be what he calls a "technical, nuts and bolts panel." Gilbert believes the task force must face up to value judgments and, in particular, consider how to balance the value of good teaching against the traditional benchmarks of scholarship, research and publication. But up to this point, Gilbert says, he has felt frustrated: "I have no sense of any timing at all. I walked out of the last meeting wondering what's happening."

The task force's wait-and-see attitude may be due for a change, however. In his recent visit to the committee, Rosovsky encouraged it to move ahead and not restrict its inquiries to narrow budgetary questions, according to several members.

Rhinoceros or Mouse?

Clearly, Rosovsky is determined to produce another Redbook. But in a departure from Conant's example, he has consciously chosen not to hinge his magnum opus on the work of a prestigious group of wise men. "We avoided that from the very beginning, we don't operate that way," Rosovsky says, even though he specifically mentioned creating a "blue-ribbon" panel in his February 1974 announcement. By creating the task forces, Rosovsky says, he hoped to gather as many ideas as possible ("they are one of the hardest things to get") and to develop a broad base of support in the Faculty for proposed changes. The task forces include about 50 administrators and faculty members. "If they agree," Rosovsky says, "it's a good basis on which to go ahead."

Forseeing that seven distinct task forces studying seven artifically divided areas would inevitably result in some overlap, Rosovsky also created a coordinating committee that he chairs. The panel includes all of the task force chairmen, President Bok and Francis M. Pipkin, associate dean of the Faculty. While the monthly meetings of the panel are now intended to prevent individual task forces from "barking up the wrong tree," according to one administrator, ultimately, the committee will attempt to synthesize the task forces' recommendations. Rosovsky stresses that the committee will work by consensus. "It's not a matter of a 7-6 Supreme Court decision," he says. "In the last analysis, one opinion will find a certain amount of favor."

Some task force members fear that failure to reach agreement in the task forces and coordinating committee could throw the final educational decisions into Rosovsky's lap, rendering worthless years of work and the dean's carefully devised system. Rosovsky rejected this notion ("I hope you don't have an army view of the way things work") and insists that, although he is chairman of the coordinating panel, each of its members has an equal voice. And to act by fiat, Rosovsky adds, would only be to doom his efforts to failure: "This faculty is self-governing in educational matters, unless you can convince them a proposal makes sense, it won't go."

Wilson, whose task force on core curriculum may generate the most controversial proposals, believes that Rosovsky's filtering system simply recognizes the largest problem of the educational review--carving proposals that the Faculty "will support enthusiastically and put time into." If Rosovsky had sent proposals to the Faculty "cold turkey," Wilson says, the dean would have risked the fate of the Doty committee, which reviewed undergraduate education in the '60s--with little lasting success.

"Moving the Faculty," Wilson says, "is like pushing a wet string--if you don't persuade everyone simultaneously, you will fail." It was a failure to recognize the Law of the Wet String that brought a swift demise to the reviews of undergraduate education at Yale and Princeton in the early 1970s. Both hinged on the work of a single blue-ribbon committee, and both faltered when they tried to gain faculty approval.

Although Rosovsky says he has never read these schools' reports ("I try to focus on the local problem"), he has set up a system that he hopes is free of their flaws. But in his concern about an ultimate Faculty rejection, Rosovsky failed to confront the weaknesses of his task force subdivisions.

With no clear delineation of their charges under Rosovsky's piecemeal approach, the task forces have faltered. In some, the open agenda has led to delay, with task forces spending weeks debating schedules and peripheral issues. There is also a pervasive confusion about deadlines and other procedural questions, and the amorphous mandates that Rosovsky offered have immobilized several of the panels. Frozen by uncertainty about the precise boundaries of their jurisdiction, these panels have often deferred to one another in potential areas of overlap--thus narrowing their approach all the more. Finally, the task forces remain uncertain about what kind of recommendations Rosovsky wants and find themselves torn between the abstract and the specific.

Despite the confusion, Rosovsky remains confident that the panels will finalize their proposals by the end of the year, in time for an intensive, summer-long effort to compile and distill a Rosovsky Redbook. Rosovsky says he hopes to be ready to offer his specific recommendations to the Faculty next fall and at the same time to complete a philosphical declaration, which he does not expect the Faculty to vote on. "One does not legislate exhortation. Whatever statement we make is not something to vote on. The actual legislation may be dry, but it must fit into some scheme," Rosovsky says.

In explaining why he now wants an "overall vision," Rosovsky the dean becomes Rosovsky the scholar. The Redbook, he says, was "written at a high point in American confidence, at a high point of American history. At the end of World War II, the Pax Americana was just beginning to develop, and America had an enormous amount of self-confidence. It felt it was beyond doubt the best of all possible societies." But today, he adds, "it's a different world, with a lot of confusion and self-doubt. The values of liberal education are much in question."

But, as Rosovsky realizes, the breadth of any vision of liberal education he eventually comes up with cannot alone effect wholesale revision of undergraduate education at Harvard. Wilson, who recognizes both the uncertainty and potential of the review, says that no one can promise that "the mountain will not labor and bring forward a mouse.

"I can't say that won't happen, but I can say the mountain is laboring. It's as easy to say that it will bring forth a rhinoceros as a mouse. But whether the faculty will accept a rhinoceros is another question."

Advising and Counseling