Harvard announced today yet another (proposed) reinvention of its undergraduate "core" education requirements.
Harvard seems to recast its core requirements in some radical and newsworthy manner every few years or so. If these changes are not responses to new knowledge and significant changes in the world, or corrections proved necessary by experience--and only some of them can be categorized in that way--then don't they prove, cumulatively and looked at over time, that Harvard does not know what it is doing?
The main facts of Harvard undergraduate studies, in my view, are: grade inflation; pre-professionalism (only 4% of students plan a career in scholarship or research); and overspecialization. These are all explained by the hypothesis that the professors, in general and as a whole, do not wish to teach undergraduates, that is, in a manner best suited to undergraduates.
Thus one has the system: professors offer overspecialized courses, since this is what interests them and matches best their own research; they do not expect students actually to master this material, in an expert way, because (one must acknowledge honestly) that material is not important for most purposes and can hardly claim to be what an educated person needs to know; they view undergraduate performance largely as a proof of aptitude and as a sign that the students are indeed qualified to be admitted to the professional schools they plan on attending (economists have even developed a theory of this, called 'signalling'); and then, because this is less burdensome for eveyone, they assign high grades for everything except deplorable performance.
I have heard it suggested that the best solution would be, not for Harvard to revise its core--that has been done repeatedly, each time apparently to no avail--but rather that it simply abolish the college and leave undergraduate education for the Williams' and Amherst's of this world. Harvard should admit that it unable do the job and transform itself into a graduate institution solely.
Yes, it's true that the students who attend Harvard are enormously talented--and, almost as importantly, they think that they are--and, therefore, they would do well and learn much no matter what system they operated under. But then, if that is the argument and the source of Harvard College's success--shouldn't Harvard pay its undergraduate students large sums for studying there, as they do grad students, not the students Harvard?
04 October 2006
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4 comments:
"If these changes are not responses to new knowledge and significant changes in the world, or corrections proved necessary by experience--and only some of them can be categorized in that way--then don't they prove, cumulatively and looked at over time, that Harvard does not know what it is doing?"
There is a third alternative of course--that they might be the result of the interpretation of the meaning of education. Education exists within a complex field of values. These values have proponents. The conversation over the implementation of education becomes then a struggle over these values. Look at the particular proposal that Harvard has offered. One core is "Religion and Faith." Others express the value of multi-cultural perspectives. I don't think these were present in cores say in the 1960's (1980's?).
I wonder whether something more important isn't occuring here. That we might be in a process of deepening our understanding of what a "liberal education" might mean today. This is a conversation that has been been going on throughout the 20th century and of course since classical greece as well.
Although I agree that major research universities like Harvard are not the best place to receive a liberal education, I would argue that the continuation of the conversation is crucial.
Those of us in this profession are, after all, educators. The confusion between scholars and educators is resisted by the periodic reminder that scholarship may be the reason you entered the profession, but finding ways to educate is your day job.
Understanding what it is we are trying to do, both as individual faculty and collectively, is a fundamentally philosophical task. (Wasn't it Dewey who said that philosophy is the general theory of education).
I for one like that this philosophical conversation is occuring and occuring publicly.
The first anonymous' post uses plenty of words, but I'm not sure whether he's said anything substantive at all. One idea that I can glimpse a bit hazily in his post is that the continual changes in the core curriculum have less to do with incompetence on the part of Harvard than with continual disagreement among the people who make the decisions at Harvard. I think Michael might be right to claim that even this shows that "Harvard does not know what it is doing," if he means by that only that Harvard has neither knowledge of what it ought to do nor conviction that it should follow any single path -- thw two most important senses in which one does or does not 'know what one is doing,' I'd say.
After spending time at some large public universities, I smile a bit when I see that Michael's criticisms of Harvard are basically the same as my criticisms of the institutions I'm intimately familiar with. From my perspective, Harvard seems like a comparative heaven for people looking for a broad, liberal arts education. I don't want to claim that Michael is wrong about Harvard, but the fact that the same problems affect very different 'levels' of higher education should be a reminder that we really are facing a problem.
Dear Second Anonymous,
I would not wish to defend true haziness, but I believe I see what Anonymous the First is getting at, namely, that there are real trade offs in education, and that we can be somewhat inconstant--in a good sense--by being pulled to reinstate something that by an earlier decision we had given an unfairly restricted attention.
We all experience this in designing a single course, never mind a path of study in the discipline. The problem would be much worse for designing a general undergraduate education.
At the same time I think you are correct that the problem is not really a lack of knowledge (I stated that briefly and provocatively, by intent) but something else--often a lack of will actually to draw distinctions, to say that some things are more fundamental than others, or simply to require something.
M
Posted by Michael Pakaluk
"I think Michael might be right to claim that even this shows that "Harvard does not know what it is doing," if he means by that only that Harvard has neither knowledge of what it ought to do nor conviction that it should follow any single path -- thw two most important senses in which one does or does not 'know what one is doing,' I'd say."
Well, from out of the haze, I'll try to make the point clearer, #2 :)
There might be some things about which there is a) no stable and simple truth (like an answer to the question what should a liberally educated person know) b) no likely unanimity of belief (because of the fragmentation and specialization of the university has created competing communities with their own beliefs about what a liberally educated person should know).
This is the sort of thing that might be usefully analyzed through Lyotard's notion of the differend.
So my third alternative is that perhaps Harvard "does not know what it is doing" and for good reason.
Throughout its history it seems that the understanding of what a liberally educated person should know has been partially determined by social and cultural forces, this has meant that it changes.
I think it is interesting that "Reason and Faith" is included in Harvard's new core proposal. It seems to signify that Harvard sees the tension between reason and faith today as a problem that every liberally educated student should be exposed to.
I assume that this is rooted in a recognition of both the enduring importance of this problem but also some sense that this problem is pressing today.
Perhaps in ten years it will not be pressing, and Harvard will come up with a new core that lacks this element.
So, in some trivial sense, Harvard does not know what every liberally educated person must know and how to institutionalize this.
And I think Michael is right that there isn't a "will" to make these distinctions. The competing fragmented interests within the university make it hard to come to any sort of consensus. We do not share any sort of view about a heirarchy of sciences that would allow us to distinguish the fundamental--each discipline thinks that it is the fundamental discipline.
We might analyze this in terms of Lyotard's "Postmodern Condition" where there is no longer a "grand narrative" or a founding "meta-discipline" as in the past (philosophy, theology, science). Getting adequate consensus without alienating is virtually impossible. If you've gone through the core curriculum reform process you probably know that no core can be created without angering some portion of the faculty. The best thing to do is to get rid of the people who disagree (sort of like what happened after the New Program was institued in 1937 at St. John's College, though that was voluntary).
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