After the Task Force on General Education released its final report earlier this year, we were optimistic about the creation of a vibrant, flexible, and student-friendly general education system that would not merely be the Core version 2.0.

Yet the proposed legislation to implement the new system has largely dashed our hopes. By leaving out critical details, the draft legislation has passed the buck to a new committee, the decisions of which could very well leave students with another lackluster and dispiriting general education system.

One of the most prominent—and in our view the most important—features of the Task Force’s report was allowing well-qualified students to break out of the straightjacket imposed by the Core by substituting departmental classes for Core requirements. In place of the Core’s often absurd criteria for classes—for instance, it requires a final exam—the Task Force recommended a more flexible set of guidelines for vetting general education courses.

The draft legislation, written by a three-member committee of professors, proposes the creation of a Standing Committee on General Education, which will oversee all aspects of the implementation of the new system, from retiring the Core to approving classes to meet the new requirements. Almost identical to the Standing Committee on the Core (at least on paper) this new system differs only in that a faculty member will serve as program director instead of an administrator.Indeed, when the original Core was created in 1978, most of the details of implementation were left to the Core Committee, which was described by then-Dean of the Faculty Henry Rosovsky as “the main forum in [the Faculty] for the discussion of undergraduate education.”

The only mention of departmental alternatives in the new legislation is a sub-point that charges the committee with creating a policy concerning “alternative means for fulfilling general education requirements with, for example, departmental courses or freshman seminars.” Gone is the critical language in the Task Force’s report that “it is important to avoid confronting students with an overly-restricted menu…[and to] avoid imposing a one-format-fits-all requirement on general education courses.”

With such broad power, the new committee promises to become a bureaucratic monster like its predecessor, stifling curricular and pedagogical flexibility and operating only in line with the letter, not the spirit, of its governing legislation. The new standing committee may begin life as an agent of reform, as the Core committee did, but over time, dynamism will inevitably devolve into inertia. If the Task Force’s rhetoric of flexibility and openness is to become reality, it must be explicitly enshrined in the legislation, not left to discretion of a bureaucracy.

Leery of the creation of a constraining system, we previously proposed a two-tiered system. One tier would include general education classes with rigid criteria listed separately at the front of the Courses of Instruction. A second tier would consist of a broad array of departmental courses so that students would have more choices of classes to take to fill their requirements.

General education classes would have to compete to get students and could not merely use their privileged position to guarantee large enrollments for a mediocre class. While we still hope the Faculty will create such a system, at the very least there needs to be a specific provision in the legislation about how liberal the committee should be in granting departmental alternatives.

It is also essential that the administration not forget the problems faced by current students, who will graduate under the antiquated Core requirement. These students too should be offered much more choice than the Core currently allows. The proposed legislation, however, is largely mute on the subject of the transition between the two systems. It leaves that issue for the new Standing Committee to decide during the 2007-2008 academic year.

Current students, however, cannot afford to wait a year for the committee to crack open the Core. We fear that recent efforts to expand students’ options under the Core and allow more departmental classes to count will stagnate as faculty are allowed to abdicate responsibility to the new Standing Committee.

If the Faculty is serious about changing general education at Harvard, it must legislate the precise changes that it desires. Regardless of the encouraging language of the Task Force’s final report, anything left out of the legislation will also be left out of the new general education system.

The new Standing Committee will respect student choice only with an explicit mandate from the Faculty. Such details will make the difference between a reprise of the Core and a new golden age of general education. The Faculty should not approve the legislation as written and must take it back to the drawing board.