Harvard’s General Education (Gen Ed) program’s website invites its students to “Explore new ideas. Expand your horizons. Engage with the world.” It instructs faculty that their proposals for course claims should be “geared toward non-specialists” and “not an introduction to a scholarly discipline.” In short, Gen Eds are orthogonal to the main thrust of anyone’s concentration or secondary, and seek to build well-rounded people rather than just effective workers.
In practice, though, the Gen Ed program becomes a catch-all for those courses which do not sit easily within a concentration or secondary, and the boundaries between Gen Ed and departmental courses can blur. In the 2019 academic year, the Gen Ed SLS 20, “Psychological Science,” became PSY 1, “Introduction to Psychological Science.” (Before 2019, Gen Ed courses had many prefixes, depending on the requirement they fulfilled. SLS, “Science of Living Systems,” was one.) The course was at the time, and has remained, a requirement for the Psychology concentration. More recently, a student petition drive has again underscored the difficulty of defining what it means to be a Gen Ed, and has brought to light the resultant precarity of courses that cannot find a home in a department.
On January 28, Meaghan Townsend ’21, Allison Pao ’21, and Nina Elkadi ’22 submitted a petition “to Renew Gen Ed 1076 for the 2021-2022 Academic Year.” The course in question, “Equity and Excellence in K12 American Schools,” has been taught at least once every academic year since 2011, occasionally more than once. However, it will not be offered this coming academic year, which Harvard College spokesperson Rachael Dane claims is due to budget constraints which have caused Gen Ed courses taught by non-FAS faculty to be put on two-year rotations.
Given the College’s description of the Gen Ed program, this decision can be seen as a way to encourage students to step out of their comfort zones and explore courses that they otherwise would not plan to take. Jacob Fay, who co-teaches 1076, told the Independent that he saw the policy as “an opportunity for students to explore a wider range of the exciting offerings from the Gen Ed program,” while Peter Bol, who teaches Gen Ed 1136, “Power and Civilization: China,” said that the decision “makes sense once you understand salary and teaching load differences between the schools.”
The students who signed the petition, however, and the professors who encouraged them, do not see it this way. Katherine Merseth, the main force behind and co-teacher, with Fay, of Gen Ed 1076, called the rotation policy “unfortunate and short-sighted” in an email to the Independent, and the petition itself, boasting dozens of pages of signatures from students, faculty, and others, claims to be “deeply disappointed.” Townsend, in an interview, explained the rationale behind this: “There is no education department at Harvard [College]… this course is… universally known and understood as the foundational course for undergraduates to study K-12 education specifically and education more generally.” Between the classes of 2019 and 2022, Townsend said, 62 out of the 73 students who graduated with a secondary field in Educational Studies took Gen Ed 1076 at some point. “More broadly,” she stated, “this [petition] is about a larger undervaluing of education at the College as a field of study.” The petition aims not to keep the wider Gen Ed program from being reformed in a potentially damaging way, but rather to maintain the status of a course which has been crucial to a sizable portion of the Harvard community.
In an email to Townsend, Pao, and Elkadi obtained by the Independent, Dean Rakesh Khurana wrote that “The committee [on General Education], along with the College as a whole, is thrilled to offer courses on education. That specific course is loved by students, as are all the courses which FAS purchases from other faculty.” Gen Ed 1076’s importance to the Educational Studies community does not give it significant additional weight; it is simply another Gen Ed. “All of us at FAS are aware that any course which cannot be offered for budgetary reasons leads to an enormous amount of student disappointment,” wrote Dean Khurana. However, he concluded by reiterating that “the General Education Committee determined that courses that are taught by non-FAS faculty members will of necessity need to be offered on a rotational basis.”
The fundamental question here is over whether the Gen Ed program is, as it claims, a way to inject the liberal arts in general into every student’s concentration, or whether it is more. If the former is true, then the loss of any given course would be inconvenient but survivable, but Townsend, Pao, and Elkadi argue instead that Gen Ed 1076 has functions beyond providing breadth of knowledge.
The curriculum in this course “can’t be offered through a department at Harvard [College], through FAS faculty, because we don’t have an Education department,” Townsend noted. According to her and the other petition authors, the Gen Ed program allows professors to teach courses which do not currently fit within an existing faculty department rather than waiting for the establishment of a committee years down the line.
Townsend described the existence of the secondary in Educational Studies as “a step in the right direction.” Pao told the Independent, “The issue here isn’t necessarily the lack of a Gen Ed on K-12 education. The issue is that the college decided to not renew its only introductory course on K-12 education for the following year.” Perhaps the Gen Ed label is immaterial.
This petition, then, can be seen as a test case for the soul of the Gen Ed program. Nobody who spoke to the Independent questioned the nobility of the Harvard College administration’s stated liberal-arts mission. But many asserted or simply assumed that the Gen Ed program should stretch beyond this mission, as it provides opportunities for professors to offer serious letter-graded courses outside of Harvard’s fifty concentrations and fifty secondary fields. The outpouring of student and faculty support for Gen Ed 1076 reveals just how effectively departmental Gen Eds fill the gaps in the Harvard College curriculum.
Nothing that the College administration has done is apocalyptic: Gen Ed 1076 will return next year, and it was never mandatory for the Educational Studies secondary in the first place, so students interested in studying education at a higher level can take a different course instead. However, the incident has brought to light a deep tension between students and administrators over whether the Gen Ed program is the right space for teaching individually important courses outside of concentration lines. If it isn’t, the questions emerge about what could replace it and whether that sort of space should exist at all.
Professors David Cutler and Brendan Meade, Co-Chairs of the Standing Committee on General Education, did not respond to an interview request by press time.
Michael Kielstra ’22 (pmkielstra@college.harvard.edu) has never actually been told to get educated.