CORRECTION APPENDED

Professors greeted President-elect Drew Gilpin Faust in University Hall with scattered applause and later a standing ovation during yesterday’s Faculty Council meeting. The good spirit carried over into the rest of the session as the final General Education report earned high marks from a formerly critical faculty. [SEE CORRECTION BELOW]

“We were expecting somewhere between a B-plus and an A-minus, and this was somewhere between an A-minus and an A,” David Pilbeam, the Ford professor of human evolution and an author of the report, said after the meeting.

Of the more than a dozen Faculty of Arts and Sciences members who spoke at the meeting, all seemed to accept the underlying vision of the report. FAS now appears ready to draft legislation to bring the report’s recommendations to life, and Interim Dean of the Faculty Jeremy R. Knowles said last week that an initial vote could come at the Faculty’s next meeting.

“It’s clear that the Faculty is going to go ahead with some version of what we’ve proposed,” Bass Professor of English Louis Menand, who co-chaired the task force that authored the report, said at the close of the meeting.

The Faculty’s warm reception was felt in the president’s chair.

“I think they got through unscathed,” Interim President Derek C. Bok said of the report’s authors.

At the last two faculty meetings, professors assailed the committee’s preliminary October report, challenging both the proposal’s specific recommendations and its overall mission. Since those meetings, the task force refined its vision for general education.

“The rationale behind this general education proposal is to draw explicit connections between a liberal arts education and the lives that our students will live after college,” said philosopher Alison Simmons, the committee’s other co-chair.

Former Dean of the Faculty William C. Kirby, -who initiated the review of general education and chose the members of the current committee, likened the trajectory of the four-year-old review to the life of an undergraduate.

He compared the first year to the excitement of a freshman seminar, “reflecting the bold interest of youth”; the second year to the struggle of a sophomore tutorial; the third year to the work of a junior paper; and the final year to the culmination of a senior thesis.

The Faculty’s response was not entirely positive.

James H. Stock, chair of the economics department, said he worried about his discipline’s place in the new program. The report “could be read as an over-narrow presentation of the social sciences,” he said.

Although they accepted its underlying vision, historians and classicists criticized the final report for being biased in favor of the present day.

“A significant minority of students might leave Harvard without having ever entirely studied the world before their lifetime,” History Chair Andrew D. Gordon ’74 said.

“The past is something everybody shares. It is not a special interest. It belongs to all of us and the entire planet,” Professor of Latin Kathleen M. Coleman said. “I want to state the danger as simply as possible: a person who has no sense of the past cannot imagine the future.”

Wertham Professor of Law and Psychiatry in Society Diana L. Eck—long a vocal observer of the review—responded that professors could conceive of “parallel ways” in which students could navigate this curriculum without taking any course in many disciplines.

“There are a lot of people who would make such suggestions that might take us down a road that would last forever,” Eck said.

Saltonstall Professor of History Charles S. Maier ’60 echoed Eck’s sentiments, saying the Faculty should concern itself not with general education’s limits but with its flexibility. “As I remember being a student here, the real problem was that there was no time to take what I wanted to take,” he said.

FIZZ FOR FAUST

Much of yesterday’s goodwill may have stemmed from this weekend’s selection of Faculty member Faust as Harvard’s next president.

Faust entered yesterday’s meeting just before it began, toting a Radcliffe red canvas bag and sitting among fellow historians.

Calling her “our new unwavering standard,” Knowles offered his colleague a bottle of champagne adorned with a “Veritas” medallion.

“Before, Drew, you add bubbles to our lives,” Knowles said to the president-elect, “on behalf of the Faculty, let me add a few to yours.”

Faust said she would not involve herself in the report’s approval process.

“I think it’s important to remember that I don’t take office until July 1st,” she said in a brief interview. Seeing the review through until then “will be Jeremy’s role.”

—Staff writer Johannah S. Cornblatt can reached at jcornbl@fas.harvard.edu.
—Staff Writer Samuel P. Jacobs can be reached at jacobs@fas.harvard.edu.

CORRECTION
Due to an editing error, the first paragraph of the Feb. 14 article "Faculty Welcomes Faust at Meeting" incorrectly described the meeting as a meeting of the Faculty Council. In fact, it was a meeting of the full Faculty.