But critics, like Baird Professor of Science Gary J. Feldman, say efforts to design an undergraduate education are futile without first establishing what the College is trying to design.

“It looked to me that the thing was done somewhat backwards, with the form done without the rationale behind it,” says Feldman, who served on the review’s pedagogy working group. “The [general education] committee came up with a general form but no specifics...They may say they have a perfect rationale but I haven’t seen it yet.”

Feldman says he worries the review may even look backwards rather than forwards, arguing it has an “alarming resemblance to the general education requirements” of two generations ago, with its proposal to replace the Core with a combination of departmental distribution requirements and the so-called Harvard College Courses, a set of as-yet-undefined broad interdisciplinary survey courses. This proposal somewhat resembles the distributional requirement system established in the 1940s, which faced widespread faculty and student dissatisfaction by the time of Rosovsky’s 1970s review that created the Core as a replacement. According to critics at the time, the flexibility of the 1940s system led to diluted courses lacking intellectual rigor and left the faculty uninspired and lackadaisical about teaching them.

Still, Wolcowitz dismisses fears about the process’s apparent lack of vision.

“I was personally less troubled than some others by the fact that we didn’t have an overarching philosophy of general education, believing that the most important goal is to ensure that students are broadly educated in a wide range of fields and do not overspecialize,” Wolcowitz says.

But critics charge that the lack of a guiding vision in this year’s review prevented a critical mass of faculty from involving themselves, leaving professors on the sidelines as the administration attempts to revolutionize undergraduate education.

“I think that the entire process has lacked an underlying vision,” says Baird Professor of History Mark A. Kishlansky. “This is a complicated curricular change because nobody is behind it...That means there’s not a cohort of faculty willing to make sacrifices.”

Moreover, the administration has disproportionately solicited the viewpoints of certain professors, exacerbating the sense of alienation among much of the faculty. The review committees, for instance, contained a substantial contingent of younger faculty, something Dean of the College Benedict H. Gross ’71 says was done “deliberately.”

“We wanted to hear some new voices on the faculty…that were coming from other institutions and had new ideas,” says Gross, who co-chaired the review. “Obviously people who have been here for a while will make their voices heard, but we wanted to get others involved in the decision.”

A NOT-SO-WELL-OILED MACHINE

If faculty outside the review felt estranged from the process, even some of the 40-odd members of the working groups that led the review found themselves mystified by portions of the final report.

Although the subcommittees met biweekly throughout the year and generated internal written reports, the recommendations of the final public report required only a vote by steering committee members—resulting in several significant discrepancies between working group proposals and the suggestions in the final report.

One of the final report’s most controversial recommendations, a 12-course cap on concentration requirements that has rankled many in the sciences, was not recommended in the Working Group of Concentrations’ final written report, obtained by The Crimson. The committee members did not learn about the change until the draft report was sent to them four days before the final report’s public release.

“We did not discuss the suggestion that the number of courses in a concentration be limited although such a recommendation found its way into the report,” says Professor of Latin Kathleen M. Coleman, who served on the concentration subcommittee and says several of the final recommendations—including that one—“do not mesh with the spirit of our discussions.”

Seven of the 14 concentration-related recommendations that ended up in the final report did not originate in the subcommittee, according to Coleman. The final report significantly expands on concentration advising and includes a recommendation to recertify all concentrations—both absent from the subcommittee’s final report.