Calling the state of higher education “gloomy,” Interim President Derek C. Bok said yesterday that faculty need to take greater ownership for the state and improvement of undergraduate education.

“I have not encountered many faculty who are even aware about how much students actually learn while in college,” Bok said at yesterday’s annual meeting of the New England Association of Schools and Colleges. “Only faculties can actively improve the quality of teaching and learning in the nation’s classrooms.”

Although presidents and deans must encourage faculty to play a central role, through incentives and funds, the responsibility ultimately lies with the faculty to enact necessary changes, Bok said. He called these reforms the “new process of enlightened trial and error.”

The author of the 2006 book, “Our Underachieving Colleges,” Bok urged colleges to abandon distributive requirements for comprehensive requirements.

“We should renounce the simple distribution requirements, which are the staple for most college curriculum, and try to do a better job of identifying what the central purposes of an undergraduate education actually are,” he said

In reference to graduate schools, he said they should recognize teaching is not an innate skill—it needs to be taught.

“The Ph.D, in my knowledge, is the only major professional program in the United States that does not prepare students for the activity that they will spend most of their professional lives [doing],” he said.

Critical thinking might be colleges’ primary goal, but they’re not accomplishing it very well, he said. To combat a regression in these skills, he said colleges must “make major efforts to shift the methods of teaching from passive lectures to more active instruction.”

Bok’s final recommendation called on institutions to enact “a continuous process of self-scrutiny and improvement.”

In a room filled with over 700 educators, who are typically the ones fielding classroom questions, Bok looked out during the question-and-answer session to a crowd of hands laid on laps—and not in the air.

“This is your chance to put the speaker in his place,” joked the president of the New England association, Philip E. Austin.

Austin, also the president of the University of Connecticut, told The Crimson, “He provided a very accurate, provocative assessment of the situation today.”

­—Staff writer Madeline W. Lissner can be reached at mlissner@fas.harvard.edu.