Harvard Rules

by Richard Bradley

  The tension between a general education, in which all students had some common intellectual experience, and academic specialization would remain constant at Harvard throughout the twentieth century. During World War II, James Bryant Conant pushed back in the direction of generalization. His decision to reevaluate the curriculum was very much a product of the time. The United States was at war with fascism, and Harvard was considering how it could best train both soldiers and citizens. In 1943 Conant established a committee of fourteen professors, led by FAS dean Paul Buck, to study the role of education in securing and promoting democracy. “Our purpose,” Conant announced, “is to cultivate in the largest number of our future citizens an appreciation of both the responsibilities and the benefits which come to them because they are Americans and are free.” Conant thought that Harvard students should have curricular choice. But he also wanted to teach them things that would bind them together, not just as products of Harvard but as Americans. That meant courses that everyone took, courses that would transmit the classic works and ideals of Western democratic thought. “There was a feeling [after the war] that we’d had a very close call, that the university had a stake in a particular kind of society and it couldn’t just go on its merry way,” said professor Samuel Beer at the time.

  The unifying power of the Harvard curriculum was especially urgent to Conant because he was pushing the university to open itself to students from all over the United States, from previously untapped minority groups and social classes. How could Harvard take students from all walks of life and provide them with a common and unifying intellectual bond? What did it mean to be an American when one college was filled with upper-crust whites from Massachusetts prep schools, the Jewish children of Eastern European immigrants, G.I.s returning from the war, farm boys from Kansas, and (a very few) black students from northern cities? Americans had to have more in common than simply how different from one another they could be.

  In 1945, Buck’s committee published a report called General Education in a Free Society, often called “the Red Book” because of the color of its cover. “There has been…no very substantial intellectual experience common to all Harvard students,” the Red Book announced. In Eliot’s or Lowell’s era, that didn’t much matter; now, it was a serious shortcoming. “The undergraduate…should be able to talk with his fellows in other fields above the level of casual conversation.” While some colleges, such as Columbia and the University of Chicago, had adopted general education curricula that required all students to take specific classes, Harvard would not go that route. The Red Book recommended that students be required to take classes in three areas—sciences, social sciences, and humanities—before continuing on to electives. Which classes, it did not specify. Instead, the faculty created about a dozen courses from which undergraduates could choose. An imperfect solution, it nonetheless achieved much, maybe even most, of what it set out to do: to ground Harvard students in a common intellectual foundation.

  Over the decades, though, the program of general education deteriorated. Like a house in need of renovation, it tilted a little as it settled into its foundation, and then started to collapse. Teaching science to non-science concentrators was always a problem. The scientists never liked teaching students who weren’t interested in their subjects and who lacked grounding in them; it was far more rewarding to teach those who aspired to become scientists themselves. And some scientists, then as now at Harvard, did not particularly want to teach at all, but saw classes primarily as a conduit for assistants to help them do their laboratory research.

  Anyway, as it turned out, many professors in both the sciences and the humanities did not want to teach general education courses. Specialization was all the rage in academia in the postwar years, and Harvard professors wanted to teach courses that reflected their specific interests, or, even better, the books they were working on at the moment. As a result, the classes they did teach became increasingly specialized. At the same time, the number of general education classes swelled, diluting the students’ common intellectual experience. Smaller departments had realized that by creating courses that qualified for the Gen Ed program, they could attract more students, thus boosting their own importance—and budgets. On top of those trends, the free-spirited 1960s led to a certain looseness in the creation of courses. Thus, by the early 1970s, Harvard students could take less-than-scholarly classes such as “Auto Mechanics,” “Athletic Department Management,” and “Scuba Diving.” Harvard even offered a class on football’s “multiflex offense,” which happened to be taught by the quarterback of the team. As it became increasingly apparent that the era of the Red Book was stumbling toward its finish line, the words of former University of Chicago president Robert Maynard Hutchins, spoken about a different era but a similar context, seemed appropriate: “The degree [the university] offers seems to certify that the student has passed an uneventful period without violating any local, state, or federal law, and that he has a fair, if temporary recollection of what his teachers have said to him.” Except that by the early 1970s, even the lawbreaking part might not have been true.

  Derek Bok took over from Nathan Pusey in 1971, marking the beginning of an era of healing and regeneration at Harvard. In 1974, his new dean, Henry Rosovsky, decided that it was time to initiate another curricular evaluation—a curricular “reform,” it was called, in the spirit of the age. Rosovsky did not ask Bok’s permission before he started the review; the every-tub-on-its-own-bottom system was strong then, and the FAS dean didn’t require the president’s permission before reexamining the undergraduate curriculum.

  Rosovsky’s ambitious curricular reform had several agendas. Of course, it aimed to revamp a sagging curriculum. But Rosovsky also wanted to reenergize the faculty after the conflict and division of the Vietnam years; to say, let us put politics aside for the moment and rededicate ourselves to the primary mission of the university, teaching and learning. His initial letter to the faculty called upon it to embrace curricular reform as a means “to recapture the spirit of its common enterprise.”

  It was not just the university that Rosovsky wanted the faculty to reconnect with, but the undergraduates. In the decades after World War II, a period of enormous growth among universities and huge sums of money flowing from the federal government, professors at Harvard (and numerous other universities) lost their sense that teaching undergraduates was the center of their professional self-definition. It may, in fact, have been the least of their priorities.

  And it was not just the professors that Rosovsky was targeting. He hoped that a process of curricular reform, and then a new and inspiring curriculum, could dampen the antagonism between students and the university. He also wanted to rein in the spirit of academic improvisation that had prevailed during the sixties. “Our curriculum at the moment resembles too much a Chinese menu,” Rosovsky said. “A very good menu—but I think that a Chinese menu in the hands of a novice can result in less than a perfect meal. I would like to supply a few waiters.” The line was classic Rosovsky—a criticism, but one that was constructive, diplomatic, even elegant.

  If Rosovsky’s reform was really going to effect such laudatory but ambitious goals, the process by which it was carried out would be critical. And so Rosovsky deliberately involved as many professors as he could. (Though not many students; at the time, there was already an excess of student input into the university.) Rosovsky knew that, in a contentious era, he could not impose reform from the top down, and that was not his style anyway. As Phyllis Keller would write in a history of the curricular reform, Rosovsky “saw his role as engaging the largest possible number of his colleagues…. He took the position that the only workable solution would be one that emerged from the faculty itself.” It was like the difference between trying to illuminate a room with a flashlight and turning on a chandelier.

  In addition to broad participation, Rosovsky enlisted academic heavyweights. Much of the actual theorizing was done by political scientist James Q. Wilson
and historian Bernard Bailyn, giants in their fields. If the faculty was going to buy into his curricular reform, Rosovsky thought, it had to have the utmost respect for its intellectual parents. After four years of hard work and patient negotiation, in the fall of 1978 Rosovsky released a report advocating a new “core curriculum,” a dramatic departure from any course of study Harvard had previously mandated.

  Perhaps the first thing to say about the core was that it rejected a fundamental principle of general education; it did not advocate a common foundation of knowledge for the entire student body. After the explosion of scholarship in the past decades, Rosovsky argued, it was simply no longer possible to define a body of knowledge that everyone would agree was the sine qua non of the educated citizen. The day had passed when one could simply announce that the Greek and Latin classics were more vital than those of the Muslim world, or declare that the history of England was objectively more important than the study of China. And of all the sciences that one should know, how could it be said that biology was invariably more important than, say, chemistry or physics? Even to try to debate these questions could provoke years of heated and divisive discussion. Just to launch that discussion would probably doom reform.

  The Core Curriculum’s answer was to advocate that students learn not specific facts or a single intellectual tradition, but “ways of knowing.” Students would be exposed to a range of disciplines in order to reach an understanding of how scholars in different fields thought, evaluated, and analyzed their own material. How did historians work? What about scientists, literary critics, and economists? “Broadly stated,” Rosovsky’s report said, “the goal of the Core is to encourage a critical appreciation of the major approaches to knowledge, so that students may acquire an understanding of what kinds of knowledge exists in certain important areas, how such knowledge is created, how it is used, and what it might mean to them personally.” To that end, the Core divided the range of study into ten “core” areas, such as historical studies, literature and the arts, moral reasoning—this was largely Derek Bok’s doing—quantitative reasoning, and science. Students would have to take a set number of courses from most of the core areas.

  Reaction to the Core was mixed. Liberals saw it as a political attempt to impose structure and control upon a freewheeling student body, even as “a class struggle between student masses and the faculty-administration elite,” as one commentator put it. Conservatives bashed the Core on the grounds that it didn’t prioritize Western thought and civilization. Scientists on the one hand thought that the Core insufficiently emphasized their fields, while on the other hand were not much interested in teaching science to undergraduates who were happily daydreaming of Jane Austen or American reactions to the Stamp Act.

  In the end, the Core had to be approved by a vote of the faculty, and the faculty did approve it, for several reasons. First, thanks to Rosovsky’s assiduous courtship, they felt that they had been included in the process and had a stake in its outcome. Second was their loyalty to Rosovsky himself; Rosovsky had turned down the presidency of Yale to complete the curricular reform, and they did not want him to come away from the process with nothing to show for it. Perhaps this was not the best reason to support a new curriculum, but in a university, as in a legislature, human relations influence policy decisions. Third, there was a sense that while the Core might have been an experiment, it was a serious and well-considered experiment, and worth trying.

  Outside Harvard, the Core had an immediate impact; it focused new attention upon undergraduate education in an era when universities had been moving more toward research and the training of graduate students. The New York Daily News called it “a refreshing contrast to the sophomoric whims and caprices that marked the do-your-own-thing revolt on campuses in the ’60s.” Few schools had the resources to duplicate the Core, which, when it was introduced, contained an astonishing sixty new courses. But it did set many on the path of revitalizing their own curricula.

  If the Core had a downside, it was that the new curriculum was a high-maintenance machine. It required the continuing close oversight of the dean and engagement of the faculty to work well, and particularly after Rosovsky’s retirement from the deanship in 1991, it did not have either. Students lamented that the Core was confusing, arbitrary, and restrictive. Many professors didn’t like to teach Core classes, as such classes tended to include concentrators who knew the subjects well and novices taking the class only because they had to. Such disparities in knowledge and enthusiasm made teaching in the Core an often unwanted challenge.

  By 2001, when Larry Summers became president, a consensus that the Core needed fixing had taken hold. But whether the program just needed to be tweaked or required a full-scale “review,” as it was now being called, was a matter of some debate. Just a few years before, in the mid-1990s, a faculty committee had examined the Core and concluded that, despite a few problem areas, the curriculum was basically in solid shape. So when Summers announced that a curricular review would be a priority, some wondered if he had hidden agendas. Previous reviews had followed periods of great social change: World War II and the 1960s. This one was following the inauguration of a new president who clearly was giving much thought to his legacy. (Summers would have argued that 1990s globalization had indeed brought huge social change.) Other skeptics wondered if the launch of a curricular review was not merely a precursor for yet another massive fund drive. Harvard had just finished such a campaign in 1999. If big donors were to give still more, they needed a new reason why, and the expenses of a new curriculum could be it. The contributions that the capital campaign might generate would also help fund the construction of the new campus in Allston.

  The review could not begin until new dean Bill Kirby had taken office, and in October 2002 Kirby sent a letter to the faculty initiating a conversation about the review. “What will it mean to be an educated woman or man in the first quarter of the 21st century?” the dean asked. “What should a Harvard graduate know in depth about a discipline or area? What are the enduring goals of a liberal education and how can they be provided in the setting of a modern research university?”

  The review’s co-chair would be Dick Gross, who was then just months away from replacing Harry Lewis as dean of Harvard College. In the spring of 2003, Gross appointed four committees whose task was to examine different aspects of the Harvard education: Concentrations, Pedagogy, General Education and Overall Academic Experience. Each committee consisted of about a dozen professors, staff, and students, and perhaps the best way to understand their work is through the experience of one of those students, Joseph K. Green, class of 2005.

  Joe Green came to Harvard from Los Angeles, California. His father was a math professor at UCLA, and Green was always a serious, studious kid. During his time at Santa Monica High School, he acted in plays, was captain of the Science Bowl team, captain of the swim team, and the student representative on the Santa Monica Board of Education. He took school so seriously that, as a senior, he was profiled in a CNN documentary called Kids Under Pressure, about the stress of applying for college.

  In truth, Green doesn’t look all that disciplined. With curly black hair, a Southern California drawl reminiscent of Sean Penn’s Jeff Spicoli character in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, and a slightly spacey manner, he comes across as an absent-minded professor in the making. At the same time, he has always taken his education seriously, and in the CNN documentary, he talked about how much pressure he felt to get into the right college. “The ideal candidate, they say, is the captain of the football team, a member of MENSA, spends his weekends running a women’s shelter out of his garage, and on the side, you know, has orphan children that he’s taking care of and everything. And, you know, has won a Nobel Prize and he’s currently in the Sydney Olympics.”

  Green was applying to a discriminating group of colleges: Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, the University of Chicago, Swarthmore, Georgetown, Stanford, and Washington University in St. Louis. Even with a
ll his extracurriculars, he wasn’t taking anything for granted. After he scored 1450 out of 1600 on his SATS, he crammed more and retook the college entrance tests. The second time around, he scored a1580.

  Green worried that all this work just to get into college was like mortgaging his present to buy his future—he didn’t have a girlfriend, he didn’t get to hang out with his friends or parents, he just didn’t have the time—but he wasn’t sure he had much of a choice. “When I’m having, like, a rough time, [I think], is it really worth the effort, does which college I get into really matter that much?” Green wondered. “I mean, shouldn’t who I am and what I’m able to do matter more? And then I think, well, that’s not really how the world works.”

  Green’s sacrifice and hard work paid off: he got in everywhere he applied, and he seemed to think just as hard about where to go as he had thought about how to get in. “The guidebooks all said that Harvard is great except for the undergraduate education,” Green remembered. “Princeton focused more on undergraduate education, and Yale students were happier. I was really stressed about it.” In the end, Green chose Harvard, because he was interested in politics and thought that the Kennedy School would provide opportunities. Still, he was never quite sure that he shouldn’t have picked Princeton, his number-two choice. “I have a little bit of a Princeton complex,” Green admitted. “I want to prove to myself that I made the right decision.”