Harvard Rules (52 page)

Reaction to the Core was mixed. Liberals saw it as a political attempt to impose structure and control upon a freewheeling student body, even as “a class struggle between student masses and the faculty-administration elite,” as one commentator put it. Conservatives bashed the Core on the grounds that it didn't prioritize Western thought and civilization. Scientists on the one hand thought that the Core insufficiently emphasized their fields, while on the other hand were not much interested in teaching science to undergraduates who were happily daydreaming of Jane Austen or American reactions to the Stamp Act.

In the end, the Core had to be approved by a vote of the faculty, and the faculty did approve it, for several reasons. First, thanks to Rosovsky's assiduous courtship, they felt that they had been included in the process and had a stake in its outcome. Second was their loyalty to Rosovsky himself; Rosovsky had turned down the presidency of Yale to complete the curricular reform, and they did not want him to come away from the process with nothing to show for it. Perhaps this was not the best reason to support a new curriculum, but in a university, as in a legislature, human relations influence policy decisions. Third, there was a sense that while the Core might have been an experiment, it was a serious and well-considered experiment, and worth trying.

Outside Harvard, the Core had an immediate impact; it focused new attention upon undergraduate education in an era when universities had been moving more toward research and the training of graduate students. The
New York Daily News
called it “a refreshing contrast to the sophomoric whims and caprices that marked the do-your-own-thing revolt on campuses in the '60s.” Few schools had the resources to duplicate the Core, which, when it was introduced, contained an astonishing sixty new courses. But it did set many on the path of revitalizing their own curricula.

If the Core had a downside, it was that the new curriculum was a high-maintenance machine. It required the continuing close oversight of the dean and engagement of the faculty to work well, and particularly after Rosovsky's retirement from the deanship in 1991, it did not have either. Students lamented that the Core was confusing, arbitrary, and restrictive. Many professors didn't like to teach Core classes, as such classes tended to include concentrators who knew the subjects well and novices taking the class only because they had to. Such disparities in knowledge and enthusiasm made teaching in the Core an often unwanted challenge.

By 2001, when Larry Summers became president, a consensus that the Core needed fixing had taken hold. But whether the program just needed to be tweaked or required a full-scale “review,” as it was now being called, was a matter of some debate. Just a few years before, in the mid-1990s, a faculty committee had examined the Core and concluded that, despite a few problem areas, the curriculum was basically in solid shape. So when Summers announced that a curricular review would be a priority, some wondered if he had hidden agendas. Previous reviews had followed periods of great social change: World War II and the 1960s. This one was following the inauguration of a new president who clearly was giving much thought to his legacy. (Summers would have argued that 1990s globalization had indeed brought huge social change.) Other skeptics wondered if the launch of a curricular review was not merely a precursor for yet another massive fund drive. Harvard had just finished such a campaign in 1999. If big donors were to give still more, they needed a new reason why, and the expenses of a new curriculum could be it. The contributions that the capital campaign might generate would also help fund the construction of the new campus in Allston.

The review could not begin until new dean Bill Kirby had taken office, and in October 2002 Kirby sent a letter to the faculty initiating a conversation about the review. “What will it mean to be an educated woman or man in the first quarter of the 21st century?” the dean asked. “What should a Harvard graduate know in depth about a discipline or area? What are the enduring goals of a liberal education and how can they be provided in the setting of a modern research university?”

The review's co-chair would be Dick Gross, who was then just months away from replacing Harry Lewis as dean of Harvard College. In the spring of 2003, Gross appointed four committees whose task was to examine different aspects of the Harvard education: Concentrations, Pedagogy, General Education and Overall Academic Experience. Each committee consisted of about a dozen professors, staff, and students, and perhaps the best way to understand their work is through the experience of one of those students, Joseph K. Green, class of 2005.

 

Joe Green came to Harvard from Los Angeles, California. His father was a math professor at UCLA, and Green was always a serious, studious kid. During his time at Santa Monica High School, he acted in plays, was captain of the Science Bowl team, captain of the swim team, and the student representative on the Santa Monica Board of Education. He took school so seriously that, as a senior, he was profiled in a CNN documentary called
Kids Under Pressure,
about the stress of applying for college.

In truth, Green doesn't look all that disciplined. With curly black hair, a Southern California drawl reminiscent of Sean Penn's Jeff Spicoli character in
Fast Times at Ridgemont High,
and a slightly spacey manner, he comes across as an absent-minded professor in the making. At the same time, he has always taken his education seriously, and in the CNN documentary, he talked about how much pressure he felt to get into the right college. “The ideal candidate, they say, is the captain of the football team, a member of MENSA, spends his weekends running a women's shelter out of his garage, and on the side, you know, has orphan children that he's taking care of and everything. And, you know, has won a Nobel Prize and he's currently in the Sydney Olympics.”

Green was applying to a discriminating group of colleges: Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, the University of Chicago, Swarthmore, Georgetown, Stanford, and Washington University in St. Louis. Even with all his extracurriculars, he wasn't taking anything for granted. After he scored 1450 out of 1600 on his SATS, he crammed more and retook the college entrance tests. The second time around, he scored a1580.

Green worried that all this work just to get into college was like mortgaging his present to buy his future—he didn't have a girlfriend, he didn't get to hang out with his friends or parents, he just didn't have the time—but he wasn't sure he had much of a choice. “When I'm having, like, a rough time, [I think], is it really worth the effort, does which college I get into really matter that much?” Green wondered. “I mean, shouldn't who I am and what I'm able to do matter more? And then I think, well, that's not really how the world works.”

Green's sacrifice and hard work paid off: he got in everywhere he applied, and he seemed to think just as hard about where to go as he had thought about how to get in. “The guidebooks all said that Harvard is great except for the undergraduate education,” Green remembered. “Princeton focused more on undergraduate education, and Yale students were happier. I was really stressed about it.” In the end, Green chose Harvard, because he was interested in politics and thought that the Kennedy School would provide opportunities. Still, he was never quite sure that he shouldn't have picked Princeton, his number-two choice. “I have a little bit of a Princeton complex,” Green admitted. “I want to prove to myself that I made the right decision.”

His freshman year was Larry Summers' first year as president, and Green's confidence was bolstered when he heard the new president say that Harvard's undergraduate education needed work. He contacted Summers' office to see if the president would need an intern to help with the upcoming curricular review, but the answer was no, the review wouldn't really start for another year or so. Still, Green couldn't stop thinking about the purpose of a Harvard education. In the fall of 2002, he went to a dinner Larry Summers threw for student leaders, and he was pleased when Summers asked the students what would be the one thing they would fix regarding Harvard? Green said that people weren't asking big questions, such as “Why are we here? What are we supposed to learn?” Summers responded that that wasn't a helpful answer, because it didn't include one specific thing that could simply be fixed.

In the second half of his sophomore year, in February 2003, Green enrolled in Economics 1010A, Microeconomic Theory, a standard introductory course. But along with other students, Green found the professor's lectures disjointed, rambling, and frequently unhelpful. He grew so frustrated that he sent Bill Kirby a lengthy e-mail about the professor, who ultimately took a four-week leave from the course to “rework” his lectures. That incident inspired a
Crimson
column headlined “World's Greatest University, World's Worst Teachers.” It also put Green in touch with the FAS administration, and that spring Dick Gross invited Green to lunch at the Faculty Club and asked if he wanted to be on a curricular review committee. Green did. He chose the committee on pedagogy, because he thought that area needed the most reform.

Meeting once every other week, the four committees began their work in the fall of 2003. At the start, Green was hopeful. He wanted to ask big questions about the purpose of a Harvard education, about the way teaching was done. Why were students not asked what courses should be offered? Why do concentrations even exist? Green had heard Larry Summers talk about how important and far-reaching this review was, so he thought that asking fundamental questions was the point. Green kept thinking about a question one of his professors had put to him: “If you could either go here and get no diploma, or not go here and get the diploma, what would you do?” It bothered Green that he couldn't easily answer the question.

But the two faculty members on the committee, historian Liz Cohen and biologist Richard Losick, quickly made it clear there wasn't time for that kind of open-ended conversation. “The response was, ‘If we ask big questions, we won't get concrete recommendations,” Green said. There was no time for big-picture debates. Summers was impatient: Bill Kirby had to release a curricular review report by May 2004, in time for commencement. His curricular review was supposed to accomplish in one year what had taken Henry Rosovsky four. Green couldn't even talk to his friends about what his committee was considering—the students had been told to say nothing to anyone outside the review process. “It was,” Green came to believe, “a fantastic way to control dissent.”

The four committees produced an interim report, which the faculty discussed briefly at a meeting on December 16. Lacking specific recommendations, the report reiterated the oft-mentioned goals of internationalization, scientific fluency, more contact between faculty and students, and increased undergraduate contact with the graduate schools. No one paid it much attention, partly because of the lack of substance, and partly because the faculty wasn't paying much attention to the review in general. Unlike Rosovsky, Kirby wasn't making a full-court press to reach out to faculty members. Even if he had, it was questionable whether they would have responded. The faculty didn't believe that Kirby was really the man running the review—and by and large, they doubted that Summers seriously wanted a university-wide conversation regarding a proposed new curriculum.

By now, the sense that Larry Summers created committees merely to forestall criticism of his pre-made decisions had grown widespread. Why invest time in a curricular review when their recommendations would be ignored if Summers disagreed with them? Certainly there was no sense that the university's greatest minds, the really legendary figures, were engaged with the process, invested in it so deeply that they had a personal stake in its success, as they had a quarter-century before. “Several faculty members who were present for the 1970s review told me they remember feeling excitement in the air as questions of education were debated,” wrote
Crimson
columnist J. Hale Russell in late March. “This time around nobody knows what's going on, much less feels excitement.”

There were signs that even Bill Kirby and Dick Gross weren't all that involved with the process. The two men were traveling frequently, both to talk about the review at other universities and to raise money; from September 2003 to March 2004, Kirby hosted eighteen alumni events designed to give alumni a sense of inclusion and solicit their financial aid. On campus, though, people said that Kirby was oddly disengaged, that despite his rhetoric, he wasn't actively involved in the review. “Bill's feeling was that this was so obviously Larry's report, what was the point of getting involved?” said one source who knew both men. One professor familiar with the review process pointed out an important distinction between Rosovsky and Kirby. It was well known that Rosovsky, he said, had turned down an offer to be president of Yale in order to complete a review. Kirby, the source thought, wanted to become a university president, and so wouldn't risk picking fights with his boss that he probably couldn't win anyway.

Kirby's appointed overseer, Dick Gross, was traveling frequently as well, for the same purposes as Kirby. But even when he wasn't, Gross delegated much of the review's work to subordinates who lacked the clout to inspire the faculty. Foremost among them was Jeffrey Wolcowitz, a lecturer in economics and associate dean for undergraduate education. Wolcowitz, who had studied curriculum management for years, was respected and well liked. He was considered a good and smart man who took questions of curricular reform seriously. At the same time, he was not a tenured professor, much less the dean of the FAS. That someone so low in the pecking order was the most involved in the curricular review struck faculty observers as bizarre, and not a good omen for the review's future. Some suspected that Wolcowitz was really Summers' ringer. “Larry pretty much handpicked Jeff to write the report,” said one University Hall source.