Harvard Rules (51 page)

For many of Brian Palmer's students, that was not a life, nor a way of living, that they would choose.

 

For all the ways in which Larry Summers had changed Harvard during his first years as president, in the spring of 2004 there still remained a lack of tangible results, clearly defined accomplishments by which to judge the Summers presidency. The Broad Institute and the Stem Cell Institute existed only on paper; the Allston planning was moving ahead slowly, as one might expect given the enormity of the project. No one was more aware of this lacuna than Summers himself, and his impatience with the pace of change was a source of ongoing stress to those who worked for him. But in the spring of 2004, that state of affairs changed as the work of the curricular review was introduced to the Harvard community. The review mattered for two reasons: It would affect every undergraduate at Harvard College, and it would be a real measure of the results of Summers' leadership style. As he and his supporters had often suggested, he may have been a bull in a china shop, but if that was what was required to change Harvard, and if that leadership style produced successful results, real improvements, then being a bull was not only justified, it was also necessary. It was
essential.

In one sense, the Harvard College curriculum was a simple matter. It dictated what students had to do to graduate from Harvard: how many courses they had to take, what requirements they had to fulfill, whether they had to study a foreign language or pass a rudimentary writing course. But for those who believed that Harvard had a great influence on its students—which was to say, virtually everyone who had ever worked or studied there—the curriculum meant much more. It reflected the university's values, priorities, and mission. Harvard told its students that it wanted them to lead the world, and the curriculum was the official blueprint for their construction as leaders. The curriculum was, in a sense, the matrix in which Harvard students were grown. That was why people cared so much about what it contained, what it encouraged. It was no coincidence that Cornel West had appeared in two of the
Matrix
films; for a man who wanted to liberate students from the addiction of passively received knowledge, the coma of intellectual apathy, such a role made perfect sense.

As times had changed over the twentieth century, Harvard changed its curriculum so that its students would never be unprepared for the world beyond its walls. But that had not always been the case. For the first two centuries of its existence, Harvard had put its students through an inflexible course of study in which they essentially memorized books—Greek, Latin, religious works—then recited the texts back to professors. Change did not come until the presidency of Charles W. Eliot, from 1869 to 1909. Eliot abolished the prescribed curriculum and instituted a program of elective study similar to those at European universities. His successor, Abbott Lawrence Lowell, tacked backwards. Convinced that students had too much freedom under Eliot's system, Lowell imposed the system of concentrations that still exists at Harvard nearly a century later. While the details have changed, the principle is consistent: Harvard students should be exposed to broad areas of study, but it is imperative that they specialize in one area, so that they not be intellectual dilettantes whose four-year education amounts to no more than a hop, skip, and a jump through the course catalogue.

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.