Is Larry Summers the new James Bryant Conant? The "Boston Globe" thinks he may well be.
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Start making sense
Critics say Harvard's curriculum fails to provide rigor, coherence, and basic knowledge. Larry Summers is on a mission to change all that.
By Patrick Healy, Globe Staff, 9/21/2003
IT WAS 1941 AND FASCISM was on the rise when James Bryant Conant, Harvard University's 23d president, hit on an imaginative way to put the growing rumors of war to academic use. He formed a committee -- not a panel of plodding pedants, but what can fairly be called the committee of Harvard's last century -- to determine "the objectives of a general education in a free society.'' Conant wanted to toughen up the curriculum and organize Harvard's jumble of tutorials, concentrations, and electives around the central idea of "general education'': There were certain things that any Harvard College graduate should know in order to contribute to society. In an age of totalitarian threats, the fate of Western democracy required no less.
The endeavor had a greater impact than even Conant probably expected. The committee's 1945 report, known as the Redbook for its crimson color, imposed structure and order on undergraduate education even as it promoted Conant's vision of citizens putting knowledge to use. An increasingly diverse student body, thanks to the GI Bill and Conant's support for meritocratic recruitment, was brought together in new required courses such as "Natural Sciences 1: The Physical Sciences in a Technical Civilization,'' "Social Sciences 2: Western Thought and Institutions,'' and "Humanities 3: Individual and Social Values.'' Conant's General Education requirements came to influence "core'' and "foundation'' curricula at high schools and other leading universities across America; by 1950, according to Morton and Phyllis Keller's 2001 book "Making Harvard Modern,'' more than 40,000 copies of the Redbook had been sold.
Flash forward to spring 2003. Harvard's 27th president, Larry Summers, is sipping Diet Coke at UpStairs on the Square, where he has dropped by to help his English faculty persuade a Pulitzer Prize winner at the dinner table, CUNY's Louis Menand, to join their department. In the relaxed atmosphere, the conversation soon turns to a matter of some consequence: Summers's new review of the undergraduate curriculum. Once again, a Harvard president was dissatisfied with academic work he regarded as lacking in rigor and inadequate to the challenges of a new globalizing era.
At one point, several professors say, Summers recalled a top Harvard art historian's reaction to his comment that he wished an old class, "Fine Arts 13,'' was still in the course catalogue to provide an introductory survey for students who probably wouldn't study art history again. Summers apparently liked this anecdote so much that he repeated it in his commencement speech last June. "Reacting with a mixture of consternation and hilarity, she wondered how I could possibly expect any self-respecting scholar to propel our students -- like a cannonball -- from 'Caves to Picasso' in one academic year,'' Summers said in the speech. He clearly hadn't cottoned to her view. Summers also told the English professors that the administration has received some letters from graduates asking why they didn't have the chance to take a Great Books-style course covering, say, Homer to Woolf.
Summers put all of this on the table, and the table jumped. It was as if the ghost of Conant were hovering at their shoulders. It's a new world, and the old ways won't do.
Menand, who has thought a great deal about the ways colleges organize education, says he and others suggested that there were fresher, more interdisciplinary approaches than traditional surveys -- a course could include the basics of "Fine Arts 13'' while also incorporating new thinking about the influences of literature, history, and politics on a given painting or sculpture.
"The Redbook was a brilliant solution, circa 1945, and that's part of what Summers is trying to get at,'' says Menand, author of "The Metaphysical Club,'' and, as of next spring, professor of English at Harvard. "I certainly hope he'll be up for something that squares this circle.''
As working groups of Harvard professors begin the curriculum review this month, with hopes of issuing their own reports by next spring, Summers hopes the results will have the same impact on the nation that the Redbook did. This review may well be his intellectual legacy at Harvard, as much as the new Allston campus may be his physical one.
But it won't be easy. Conant's curriculum spoke to an age when the belief in systematically unifying human knowledge, and using it to advance democracy and prosperity, was strong. In his own way, Summers is an heir to Conant's optimistic, liberal-minded, science-friendly tradition. But he lives in a very different age, when the belief that there is any single, universally valid organization of knowledge has come into question, and some theoreticians batter away at the universal truth claims of science even as it changes the world at a dizzying pace.
Summers and his faculty are searching for educational consensus at a time when new fields of knowledge are multiplying as rapidly as Internet blogs, and the very concept of consensus is in ill repute in some quarters. Harvard College Associate Dean Jeffrey Wolcowitz estimates that "with 650 faculty members, there will be 650 ideas about what we want our students to learn.''
All opinions are equal among the new curriculum working groups, but clearly Summers's opinions are more equal than others. At commencement, Summers made it clear he expects the review to lead to real reforms with a certain back-to-basics ring to them.
"All students,'' he argued in front of 5,000 graduating seniors, parents, and alumni, should "know how to compose a literate and persuasive essay,'' "know how to interpret a great humanistic text,'' "know how to connect history to the present,'' and "know -- they should genuinely understand at some basic level -- how unraveling the mysteries of the genome is transforming the nature of science.''
The soft oratory skills of many in Generation Y were no less a concern. "It is not clear to me that we do enough to make sure that our students graduate with the ability to speak cogently, to persuade others, and to reason to an important decision with moral and ethical implications,'' said Summers, himself an intimidating master of rhetorical combat who tends to make up his mind by arguing points and counterpoints with those whose intelligence and oratorical skills he respects.
Certainly, Summers's academic review is even more breathtakingly ambitious than those of past presidents. In the late 19th century, Charles W. Eliot thoroughly modernized Harvard by allowing students a wide choice of electives, But in 1902, Eliot and his faculty -- including his future successor, A. Lawrence Lowell -- undertook a major study of the free elective system, which resulted in a more rigid curriculum, featuring more concentrations (as Harvard calls majors) and faculty-student tutorials. Conant, in turn, wasn't a huge fan of tutorials, thinking them too costly in money and faculty time. He wanted a general education program that would push "gentleman's C'' students toward a mastery of core knowledge and higher academic standards.
But a generation later, the faculty had largely lost interest in Conant's "Gen Ed'' and the '60s protest culture had led to grade inflation, optional final exams, and other challenges to traditional academic standards. At this point, another activist president, Derek C. Bok, and his right-hand dean, Henry Rosovsky, undertook their own Conant-like review of the situation. In 1978, they replaced required courses such as the Conant-era Natural Sciences 1 with a new "Core Curriculum'' that covered areas of study from "Historical Studies'' to "Moral Reasoning'' to "Literature and Arts,'' while offering a wide range of courses in each. The Core combined the classical and comprehensive-sounding (Marjorie Garber's "Shakespeare, The Early Plays,'' the late Stephen Jay Gould's "The History of Life and of the Earth'') with the more specialized ("The Hero of Irish Myth and Saga,'' "Korean Cultural Identities'').
This Core -- still in place today -- owed something to the advent of progressive educational theory. It was concerned less with names and dates and Great Books (though some were studied) than with a guiding philosophy: Familiarize students with "ways of knowing'' and "modes of inquiry'' that would then undergird a lifetime of critical thinking.
Today, every aspect of the curriculum is on the table -- the Core, the concentrations, faculty-student advising, students' writing skills, and even their speaking abilities. But there is a widespread belief on campus that the president is hoping most of all to transform the Core and its perceived emphasis on methods over content.
"When we consider the importance, embodied in the core, of exposing students to 'ways of knowing,' I hope that we will think more rigorously about the level of mastery we ask of our students, and more flexibly about how we let them acquire it,'' Summers declared at commencement.
Of course, there is more than one way to organize a liberal arts curriculum. Columbia University's famous year-long course Literature and Humanities, or "Lit Hum,'' which came of age decades before Conant's Gen Ed, requires all students to read most of the same Great Books: "The Odyssey,'' Dante's "Inferno,'' "King Lear,'' as well as "Crime and Punishment'' and "To the Lighthouse.'' The University of Chicago, a longtime Great Books bastion, requires students to take small seminars that differ in their readings but largely maintain a classic Western Civ spirit. Many schools have simpler "distribution requirements'' -- two semesters of math, two semesters of humanities, and so on. And some lack a core altogether, such as Brown, which gives students the right to take lots of electives and encourages them to experiment with unfamiliar material by allowing "satisfactory/no credit'' grades.
Summers has not pressed for a Great Books curriculum, but many scholars think he wants to see more survey classes in the traditional mold. The core's emphasis on "ways of knowing,'' in the view of some observers, has grown mushy and inchoatea pleasant-sounding theory that doesn't actually guarantee the acquisition of basic knowledge. Asked if this approach had weakened undergraduate education, or made it fuzzier, Summers says in an interview, "I don't think I want to pass judgment on that. I think the types of approaches and perspectives have to considered by the faculty. . .. I do hope achieving knowledge in key areas would be a crucial element in the general education component.''
On campus, some students dislike the core for being too burdensome (it consumes about a quarter of their studies). Others charge that it is too easy (many classes include subject matter that students are mastering elsewhere) or too random. In any case, it certainly lacks the intellectual coherence and structure of Conant's General Ed scheme. Robert P. Kirshner, a popular astronomy professor who teaches the Core course "Matter in the Universe,'' describes the sometimes confusing core rubrics Science A and Science B as, respectively, "science with numbers'' and "science with stories.'' He says: "Dinosaurs -- Science A or B? It's B, but there are things people ought to know about dinosaurs in A. It's very possible to get through the core and not know those things. Never underestimate the ingenuity of students who want to avoid things.''
The core does have some perennial favorites that draw hundreds of students year after year. Last fall's top courses included former President Reagan adviser Martin Feldstein's "Principles of Economics,'' a review of the fundamentals, and political theorist Michael Sandel's "Justice,'' which takes up ideas about rights, fairness, and community from Aristotle to Kant to Rawls. A less conventional but scarcely less popular class, Thomas Forrest Kelly's "First Nights: Five Performance Premieres,'' focuses on the first performances of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, Handel's "Messiah,'' and three other famous pieces of music, and ends each semester with the premiere of a specially commissioned work.
Shakespeare scholar Marjorie Garber grants that the core has changed "opportunistically'' over time, as new professors fashion their own, sometimes highly specialized courses and then try to fit them under the core's rubrics. "It was seen as something broadening, trans-departmental. But that doesn't map very immediately onto a structure.'' She adds that many students see the core as "a barrier and not an opportunity.''
If Summers may be looking backward to revive the traditional survey class, he is also looking forward. Nothing is more crucial to Summers, or more dissatisfying, than the state of science education and "science literacy'' for non-science majors. In the 21st century, he suggests, Harvard graduates who don't know the difference between a gene and a chromosome should be as ashamed of themselves as Harvard graduates of years past who couldn't name the author of "Hamlet.'' And "exposure'' to science is not enough.
Students "will need to achieve a reasonable working knowledge of, and facility with, [science's] means of measurement, analysis, and calibration,'' Summers said at commencement.
Many Harvard scientists, understandably, are pleased by the attentionas well as by the prospect of brand-new labs in Allston. But there is, of course, more to figure out than how to teach that gene-chromosome lesson to lit majors. How much math understanding will students be required to have? How will this change the demands put on science professors? Harvard tends to hire scientists because they're great researchers first and foremost -- that many are also enthusiastic teachers, Kirshner says, is a "central miracle'' of the place.
On a fundamental level, does the curriculum make science sufficiently exciting to students? This last question is posed by Bill Kirby, a historian of China and the dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, who is overseeing the curriculum review.
"Fifty percent of students who come in as freshmen think they may well major in the sciences, but only about 25 percent of them actually do,'' Kirby notes. "There are many reasons for this. There are individuals who wish to go to medical school and then in the middle of organic chemistry discover they're better suited to poetry. But beyond that, our current curriculum isn't bringing students into the sciences in the same way as the social sciences or the humanities.''
John Huth, chairman of the Harvard physics department, hopes that the new curriculum will allow scientists and humanists to strike up better conversations. "There was a recent newspaper article on a massive black hole emitting a sound below the lowest frequency. I was discussing this with non-scientists who had some background in the sciences. They were quite interested and engaged. There are many others who wouldn't have the foggiest idea of what the word 'wavelength' meant,'' Huth says.
Some pieces of a new curriculum could be in place as early as fall 2005, and some things about it are already virtually certain. Students will still graduate in four years, not three, Kirby says, even though students are coming from high school with more Advanced Placement credits than ever. ("We assume that four years at Harvard College is a good thing,'' he says.) There will be more chances for small-group work among students, and greater contact between students and professors (a Summers priority).
Of course, there is also great potential for conflict. Will the likely Allston facilities bring more students into the lab, or merely ghettoize the sciences by putting them across the river? Will the stiffening of scientific requirements leach resources away from the humanities? Will professors who have tailored their classes to their own interests willingly accept new teaching assignments? But Benedict Gross, the new dean of Harvard College and point man on the review, notes that there is a broad desire among professors to restructure the curriculum, suggesting that the process will not collapse from infighting.
"The faculty that grew up with the core has largely retired,'' Gross says. "A lot of what's driving this is the interest of the faculty today in possibly simplifying the curriculum.''
For all the uncertainty, it is undeniably an exciting time at Harvard. "We're taking the building down to the studs a little bit, and seeing what's a bearing wall and what's not,'' says Garber. Adds Dean Kirby: "It is that kind of creative anarchism that we're trying to explore.''
Patrick Healy is a Globe reporter. He can be reached at phealy@globe.com.
© Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company.
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