OxBlog

# Posted 7:50 PM by Patrick Belton

FRESH THINKING FROM LARRY SUMMERS ABOUT RESTRUCTURING UNDERGRADUATE EDUCATION: President Summers's commencement proposals last week about restructuring undergraduate education at Harvard were gusty, idealistic, and far-reaching. Henceforth, a few greatest hits:

"First, in a project as ambitious as the curricular review now underway, it is easy to lose sight of the "knower" as we strive to agree on what should be known.... The only true measure of a successful educational model is our students' experience of it. I was thus moved and troubled by a recent letter from a science concentrator admitted to the top graduate programs in his field, which contained the statement: 'I am in my eighth semester of college, and there is not a single science professor here who could identify me by name.'"

" We regularly learn in senior surveys that our students are satisfied with and proud of their experience at Harvard. But both objectively and relative to their peers at other institutions, they are more satisfied with their outside activities than with their academic experience.....I hope that in any new curricular approaches we may adopt, we will think hard about how to incorporate aspects of our students' extracurricular experience that make them so meaningful"

".. 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"

"I recently commented to one of our leading art historians that it would be terrific if Fine Arts 13 [a popular fine-art survey course, cancelled for lack of faculty willing to teach it] were still available as an introduction for students who would probably never take another art history course in their lives. 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 cannon ball -- from "Caves to Picasso" in one academic year. In this age of exploding and highly specialized knowledge, and justified skepticism about Olympian claims, it is not easy to figure out how we can legitimately address our students' desire for familiarity with the landscape of the major fields of knowledge. But I hope we will do our best to wrestle with this issue. "

This is fresh thinking, of the sort that can even conceivably overwhelm being dragged down by the combined weights of university committees, vested departmental and bureaucratic interests, and the seductive normative power of the factual. I wish President Summers well, and we will be watching with eagerness from the sidelines as he takes on a task of such odyssean proportions.

UPDATES: Innocents Abroad have thoughtful comments on the topic, including about the role of the classics in providing a bulwark for liberalism precisely by pointing out liberalism's shortcomings. And our friend Josh Cherniss makes the point that the central problem Summers is confronting in undergraduate education - namely, a noteworthy lack of attention given to the educative aspect of education - is particularly conspicuous at his own university. On the other hand, an optimistic take might be that this could make him all the more likely to come up with even bolder reforms - we'll see.