Harvard in the Times
Charles McGrath has a curious piece on Harvard's curricular review in Sunday's Times "Education Life" supplement. (It's not up on the Times website yet; I'll link when it is.)
McGrath takes a look at the curricular review report released last fall "to a certain amount of fanfare in the non-academic press." (By which he means the New York Times and its subsidiary, the Boston Globe.) But, McGrath rightly reports, "inside the ivory towers it landed on many desks not so much with a thud as a rustle."
That was because, both literally and figuratively, the report was not weighty enough to land anywhere with a thud.
As George Washington University president Stephen Joel Trachtenberg put it, the report "is old wine in new bottles."
Ouch. You know it hurts Harvard when its curricular review is dissed—accurately dissed—by the president of GW.
McGrath adds that "in 2003, for example, Yale issued a report, four years in the making, that winds up in more or less the same place as Harvard's but is far more eloquent and detailed."
Having read Yale's report, I can tell you that this is very true; in reading it, you can feel the passion for education, the acquisition of knowledge, and yes, teaching. Then-Yale College dean Richard Brodhead, now president of Duke, did an excellent job building consensus and shepherding the Yale review along the road to completion.
McGrath's larger point is that it's extremely difficult to create a system of general education because no one can agree these days on what every student should know. He writes: "The Harvard experience suggests that though the goal of general education is as attractive as ever, the idea of prescribing it or enforcing it, instead of just holding it out as an ideal, is probably a losing battle."
I'd agree with the first point: building a modern prescription for general education is a real challenge. (McGrath's article does not ask why anyone even considers such an education a good thing, but that question is the beginning of the process, and it was never asked in the Harvard review.)
On the second point—what we can learn from Harvard's experience—I beg to differ.
McGrath has fallen into what I call the "Harvard trap"—the logical fallacy that because Harvard is the world's most famous university, and certainly one of its best, what happens at Harvard will determine what happens everywhere else.
That's lazy thinking, usually a signifier that the reporter either went to Harvard or has children who did. (In McGrath's case, I believe it's the latter. McGrath himself went to Yale, class of '68, I think—judging from this column in the Yale Alumni Magazine. Whatever the case, his essay should disclose these connections, and of course does not. The Times always considers itself above such disclosure.)
In fact, the curricular review at Harvard has been wrought with specific issues and challenges specific to that university, and is essentially irrelevant to a broader educational discussion.
First, as McGrath himself later points out, is the problematic role of Larry Summers. The Harvard president first talked up the curricular review endlessly, then tried to control it, then tried to have its minions control it, and then—when he sensed it was going to be a bomb—distanced himself from it. (McGrath puts it differently.)
Second is the lackluster roles played by Bill Kirby and Benedict Gross. New to their positions, appointed by Summers, neither Gross nor Kirby have impressed in their roles as stewards of the curricular review. But of course, since the review process was corrupted by Summers' involvement from the beginning, it's hard to know where to put the blame for their halfhearted engagement with it.
Third—again, as McGrath points out, further contradicting himself—the review process at Harvard is challenging because its students are "spiky, choosy, and don't like taking direction."
(Spiky?) Harvard promotes an atmosphere of individualism—something McGrath doesn't quite get—which makes it difficult to then turn around and say, We want you all to take some of the same courses, learn some of the same things.
Fourth, it's particularly tough to fashion general education courses at a university where professors are famous for not wanting to teach, and not having to. This is nowhere more true than at Harvard.
So I think McGrath is wrong: You really can't draw any universal conclusions about the viability of a general education curriculum from the Harvard experience. As is so often the case, Harvard is exceptional.
It's worth pointing out that, back when Harvard dean Henry Rosovsky ushered the Core Curriculum into existence, he never claimed that the Core would have applicability to other universities. It was designed for Harvard, he said, and other schools wouldn't have the resources to create courses as the Core would, or the professors who could teach them as well. Harvard was doing its own thing, and what was wrong with that? As an educational leader, it should do exactly that.
The current curricular review suggests that, at least in this context, Harvard is no longer an educational leader.
