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On upheavals at Harvard
Harvard's dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, William Kirby, has resigned after a difficult tenure spent navigating tensions between Harvard faculty and Harvard president Lawrence Summers. One casualty of Kirby's turbulent past year is his plan to revamp Harvard's undergraduate curriculum, an important opportunity that appears to have been squandered by lack of strong leadership and distracting political squabbles. InsideHigherEd.com has the details. In the comments to that article ACTA president Anne Neal has weighed in on Harvard's unfortunate failure to follow through on a restructuring that is not only seriously needed at Harvard, but also needed nationwide:
In the midst of the Second World War, Harvard president James Bryant Conant decided education was more than just taking courses. Witnessing the onslaught of the Nazis, Conant sought to define a unified concept of general education - a broad vision of education for all Americans. The outcome of this commendable effort was the so-called "Red Book" of 1945 which described general education as "that part of a students' whole education which looks first of all to his life as a responsible human being and citizen."As a result of that effort, institutions across the country took Harvard's lead and subsequent generations benefitted from a cohesive and rigorous core curriculum.
That's why Harvard's recent report on its curricular review is so disappointing. At a time of breathtaking change in our society, Harvard had the opportunity--just as it did in 1945--to establish a vision of general education in the 21st century.
Instead the elephant has produced a mouse--a report with many good ideas but lacking in the courage and foresight of Conant's Red Book. Harvard's explicit focus on international study and science are to be commended. But by allowing choice to be a lodestar for curricular design, the faculty has opted for the path of least resistance when it comes to general education. The great promise of the proposed Interdisciplinary Courses--what appears to be a sort of optional core curriculum--is severely undermined by the faculty's insistence on retaining distribution requirements as an alternative approach to general education, something that we address more fully in our report, The Hollow Core.
This does a disservice to those of us who care deeply about general education and who hoped that Harvard's efforts would prompt a penetrating national conversation on the nature, structure, and importance of "general education" in free society.
I don't know whether Kirby's departure will make a difference. But I hope that his departure will provide an opportunity for the faculty and President Summers to revisit the very valid criticisms which have been raised about the curricular panel's efforts to date.
Read about ACTA's Hollow Core report here, and request a copy here.
Posted by acta online on February 01, 2006 at February 1, 2006 08:42 AM
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