Editor’s Note: Thomas Ehrlich ’56, the former president of Indiana University, provost of the University of Pennsylvania, and dean of Stanford Law School, wrote the following essay for his 70th reunion class report. It appears here in lightly edited form.
I.
The topic I was assigned for our Seventieth Report is properly the subject of multiple volumes, not a short essay weakened by a failing memory. My apologies for all I omitted that you would have included if given the opportunity.
For many of you, time spent on the Crimson, or an athletic team, or some other co-curricular activity, was your most meaningful Harvard experience. But we all tried to scale the academic side of Harvard. That side is wide and deep, of course, and I explore only a handful of issues from among the scores that deserve attention as I toggle back and forth between Harvard particularly and American higher education generally. My emphasis is especially on general education, as opposed to education in a major, because general education was our common academic experience at Harvard College.
It seems well to start with the most significant single change at Harvard since our time as students—the merger agreement of Radcliffe College and Harvard in 1999, under President Neil Rudenstine (1991-2001), which was preceded by multiple intermediary steps, including, in the 1970s, joint admissions and alumni applicant interviews, tentative, partial co-residence living experiments, and eventually complete equality in shared residences both within the House system and the Radcliffe Quad dorms, before undergraduate women and men were recognized as equal. Those steps are described in delicious detail by Drew Faust, first dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and subsequently president of Harvard University, in a speech titled “Mingling Promiscuously: A History of Women and Men at Harvard,” delivered to the Class of 2006.
As you will recall, when we were freshmen, Radcliffe women, though taught coeducationally by Harvard professors since 1947, lived in separate residences, engaged in mostly separate extracurricular activities, were not permitted in Lamont Library, and received a separate diploma in a commencement ceremony separate from Harvard’s. (The Class of 1963 was the first to receive Harvard diplomas and, not coincidentally, the first to celebrate a joint 25th Reunion in 1988; the first joint Commencement was in 1970.) And no woman was a tenured member of the Harvard faculty until 1948. Thanks to remarkable leadership at Radcliffe, especially by Mary Bunting and Drew Faust, all that changed, though slowly and not without struggles as many Radcliffe alumni continued to feel a deep loyalty to Radcliffe and women’s education. Even now, there is still a well-attended Radcliffe Day with a notable woman speaker in the Harvard Commencement schedule.
Viewing higher education as a whole in the United States, we see that a gradual shift has also occurred in the place of women compared to men. In 1952, about 5 percent of women and 8 percent of men had college degrees. Today, those figures have risen to about 36 percent of men and 39 percent of women. As Faust pointed out in her 2006 speech, in the 1970s “emerging consciousness about women’s issues nationwide and growing pressure for coeducation at schools like Yale and Princeton, that Harvard did regard as its peers, contributed to the power of demands for change.”
Since 1979, women have made up a majority of undergraduate students in the United States and are now 58 percent. A flood of articles has appeared about “the boy problem”—why have boys fallen so far behind compared to girls in terms of higher education and what to do about it. Should boys, for example, start elementary school one year after girls? Much less attention has been paid to why women are so successful in higher education. Is it because most of their teachers before college were women? Or because their mothers were better role models than their fathers? Or because well-paying jobs in factories or occupations like plumbing were available to men without a college education, and not to women? (Nearly all U.S. all-men’s colleges have become coed—primarily in the 1970s—while many women’s colleges remain all-women.) The answer is probably all those factors and many more.
Reflect back to our time as Harvard or Radcliffe undergraduates. World War II had ended, and America’s economy was booming. The ravages of the war still scarred much of the world, but our country was relatively unscathed, although over a million American men (and women) were killed (416,800) or wounded (761,278) in the war. Ours was a propitious moment for young men to enter Harvard in educational terms as well. An academic revolution had happened only a few years before our arrival. Under the 40-year tenure of Harvard President Charles Eliot, the undergraduate curriculum was essentially elective except for some limits of form. The only substantive requirements were a course in English composition and a reading knowledge of a foreign language. While this was an immense step forward compared to the previous prescribed classical curriculum, with its emphasis on Greek, Latin, and mathematics, it left Harvard with no courses that prepared undergraduates “to think effectively, to communicate thought, to make relevant judgments to discriminate among values.” Those were the words that summarized the aims of the new General Education curriculum that greeted us in 1952.
These aims were expressed by a distinguished Harvard faculty committee—all men, of course— appointed by James Conant (Harvard president, 1933-1953) to propose a new curriculum for “General Education in a Free Society,” sometimes known as “The Red Book” and still well worth reading. Next only to the King James version of the Bible, it is the best committee-written substantial text—267 pages—that I know. The title of Conant’s charge to the committee made clear his view that the general education curriculum should serve the aims of a democracy. It was a direct response to the perceived dangers of communism. While not officially banning communists from teaching at Harvard, Conant did advocate excluding communists from teaching positions.
Conant’s charge and the committee’s report accepted the philosopher John Dewey’s position that education in our society should be about more than preparation for lives of personal fulfillment and professional accomplishment. Education should also be designed to make democracy work.
This was not the first curriculum in our country aimed at general education. Professor John Erskine at Columbia University and Robert Maynard Hutchins, president of the University of Chicago, both led moves to establish core curricula on their campuses focused on the greatest books of the Western world. Erskine was the first, and Hutchins soon followed with particular emphasis on metaphysics. It is hard to overemphasize the impact across the country of Hutchins’ view that the Great Books contained eternal truths. In 54 volumes, the Encyclopedia Britannica sold thousands of sets to the public. This view led to a core curriculum of Great Books not only at Columbia and Chicago but also scores of other leading colleges and universities. But not at Harvard.
The curriculum that the Conant committee proposed was not fully approved by the College faculty, but its precepts guided the general education curriculum that we in the Class of 1956 were one of the first undergraduate classes to follow. It also had a wide and lasting impact on higher education across the country. The committee distinguished general from special education, which is focused on a student’s prospective employment. General education, in the words of the committee, is “that part of a student’s whole education which looks first of all to his life as a responsible human being and citizen.”
Leading faculty often taught general education courses. And they taught with that definition of general education much in mind. The committee criticized the common practice of faculty teaching courses in their academic fields as though all their students were going to become specialists in those fields. We were blessed by a rich array of general education courses in the humanities, the social sciences, and the natural sciences, with at least one course required in each discipline. I recall two courses I took that serve as markers of the overall quality of those courses.
Bernard Cohen and Thomas Kuhn taught the natural sciences course I took on the history of scientific discovery. Cohen was the leading historian of science in the country, who later became the first chair of the new department in that field. Kuhn, a historian and philosopher of science, was later to publish one of the most influential books ever written on the history of science, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Both were superb teachers as well as scholars.
As was the political scientist Louis Hartz, who taught the social science course I took. His seminal book, The Liberal Tradition in America, shaped much of political thought in the field for decades. He taught the course not with the aim of training future political scientists but rather preparing future civic leaders. And he along with Arthur Schlesinger Jr., a historian, writer, and social critic, taught their students that ideas have mattered in our country’s history. The “great man” approach to American history gave Harvard undergraduate insights about the importance of leadership, but not much about the ideas that spurred our leaders—nor was that “great man” approach much of an inspirational reality to the Radcliffe women who took their courses.
Although there were very few tenured women professors at Harvard then, and none in my own field of concentration (government), there were tenured women of note during the 1950s who deserve mention: in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the first woman was Helen Maud Cam in 1948, a distinguished authority on English constitutional history. Cam was followed by Cora A. Du Bois in 1954 (anthropology) and Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin in 1958 (astronomy), who was the first woman tenured from within Harvard.
Those general education courses I mentioned, and several other distinctive components, marked our undergraduate years in academic terms. The tutorial system, beginning then in the sophomore year, was a primary feature, at least for my wife, Ellen Rome Ehrlich ’56, and me. We spent an hour or more every week with our tutors discussing an assigned reading, often having written an essay about that reading. We came to know those tutors as friends as well as teachers. Some of us wrote an honors thesis, guided by our tutors, in our senior year. For most of those who did, it was our first piece of sustained scholarship. Mine was on the role of public opinion in a democracy. What an absurdly audacious topic for an undergraduate! At the end of our senior year, there was a general examination in our academic field of concentration. Currently, regular faculty no longer serve as tutors, and tutors were replaced by upper-level and graduate students. Only a few disciplines still require a general examination. From my perspective, both changes eliminated important elements in our education.
More generally, academic requirements have changed many times over the last 70 years. A new core curriculum was adopted by Harvard in the 1970s with a view to ensuring that undergraduates are broadly educated in seven approaches to knowledge: foreign cultures, historical study, literature and arts, moral reasoning, quantitative reasoning, science, and social analysis. Guidelines and faculty review committees were established to make certain that courses in these areas ensured that students gained a general education.
Over time, the number of courses that qualified kept expanding and the guidelines were increasingly ignored. When Lawrence Summers became president in 2001, he made reform of the undergraduate curriculum a top priority. A committee was appointed the following year and struggled during the subsequent three years before it finally produced a pitiful product: a minimum distribution requirement for undergraduates—three courses in each of three fields. Since undergraduates would major in one of those fields, this meant a distribution requirement of six courses chosen from hundreds offered by faculty in their various disciplines. Fortunately, the proposed new approach to general education failed to gain the support of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. At the end of the academic year in 2006, Summers resigned after a vote of no confidence by the faculty.
No general education program is perfect, and no doubt the one at Harvard had weathered and aged. But the answer was to replace it with a strong curriculum that was shaped by a vision of the knowledge, the skills, and the habits of mind that students need to go on learning and to be engaged and responsible leaders. Students deserve the guidance of faculty to that end. That was the philosophy of general education when we were students, and of the 1970s core curriculum as well. Since its form no longer served that function, the form was due for a change, but not the function.
Fortunately, when Derek Bok, the Harvard president from 1971 to 1991, was called out of retirement in 2006 to serve as Harvard’s interim president for one year, he encouraged the undergraduate curriculum committee to try to do better. And the committee did just that. It produced a deeply thoughtful plan that was adopted. The new plan articulated four “overarching goals” of general education: equipping students for participation in civic life; teaching students to understand themselves in terms of traditions of art, ideas, and values; preparing students to grapple with change; and developing “students’ understanding of the ethical dimensions of what they say and do.” To meet those goals, students were required to take at least one course in each of eight subject areas: aesthetic and interpretive understanding; culture and belief; empirical and mathematical reasoning; ethical reasoning; science of living systems; science of the physical universe; societies of the world; and the United States in the world. All eight areas were defined in terms of criteria that had to be met for courses to qualify for general education credit.
During Bok’s interim presidency, he oversaw preparation of a second group of proposals to promote the status and quality of teaching at Harvard, while a third focused on improving science teaching for undergraduates. “Having studied the history of curricular reform with some care,” wrote Bok in his annual report at the time, “I can say with confidence that, taken as a whole, the measures just described represent the most comprehensive group of proposals to improve our undergraduate program in more than a hundred years.”
Bok was a great Harvard president, in the league with Conant. Countless times during his tenure he showed how important leadership is to a university, where no one gives orders to faculty. Rather, academic leadership requires developing a clear set of academic goals, in collaboration with faculty, and both guiding and assisting faculty in the achievement of those goals. Larry Bacow was another great Harvard president, and from a distance, based on what I have read, Alan Garber is as well. As I write, his clashes with the Trump administration are unsettled, but the stands he has taken from my perspective are admirable.
Currently, the undergraduate general education requirement is that students must complete one course from each of four categories: aesthetics and culture; ethics and civics; histories, societies, individuals; and science and technology in society. I hope it offers as rich educational rewards to students today as we received in the 1950s. A course in quantitative reasoning is also required. A distribution requirement for Harvard students today differs from the one in our years, but a course in writing and proficiency in a foreign language are still required. I am not sorry that Harvard dropped the requirement in our time that students learn to swim as a condition of graduation.
In terms of the substance of what is taught at Harvard and in higher education generally, many academic subjects have changed little, and others completely. Courses on Shakespeare still assign his plays, of course, though their interpretations are enriched by succeeding generations of scholars. But cell biology, the heart of current biology courses, did not exist when we were students. Today, quantitative reasoning dominates the social sciences, as well as the natural sciences, and has even found a significant place in the humanities. By contrast, when I majored in government, I had only one quantitative course, political science: Professor V. O. Key’s course on elections and voting.
II.
Prior to the advent of the internet and then AI, the most important changes in how teachers teach over the past decades involve new forms of pedagogy. In our era, virtually all classes in colleges and universities were taught in lectures by professors, often with small sections of two dozen or so undergraduate students taught by graduate students, or labs supervised by graduate students. Lectures are still the dominant mode of teaching in higher education, despite overwhelming evidence that lectures are an ineffective mode of teaching. Scores of studies have shown active-learning pedagogies that enable students to be engaged participants in learning rather than passive listeners are far more effective. I call them pedagogies of engagement.
There have been advocates for this approach for over a century. John Dewey, our country’s greatest philosopher of education, believed passionately that educational institutions at all levels should be shaped to nurture communal values, abilities, and understandings. This can happen, he argued, only if students are constantly collaborating and interacting with others, both inside and outside the institutions. Their teachers should establish within the controlled environment of a school—but closely linked to the broader societal setting—the arrangements that enable students to learn cooperatively and to learn from each other.
Fortunately, the past decades have been marked by a rapid expansion of pedagogies of engagement. Dewey stressed three key elements for learning that lasts. First, the process should engage students in reaching outside the walls of the school and into the surrounding arenas. Second, it should focus on problems to be solved. And third, it should be collaborative, both among students, and between students and faculty.
Each of those elements is reflected in a pedagogy of engagement that started gaining strength in the mid-1980s. Often the three are used in combination. What became widely known as “service learning,” or “community-based learning,” was the first of the major pedagogical shifts. Service learning calls for academic learning to be linked directly to civic work, with student reflections assigned to ensure the linkage leads to long-term learning. Biology courses that include helping communities test their water supplies are an example. Research has shown that service connects thought and feeling in a deliberate way, creating a context in which students can explore how they feel about what they are thinking and what they think about how they feel. The interaction of academic work and civic work, linked by guided reflection, offers students opportunities to consider what is important to them—and why—in ways they too rarely experience otherwise. More recently, service-learning courses have been designed to not only link a political science course, for example, with community service through working in a community kitchen, but also asking what public policy changes are required so that community kitchens are no longer needed.
Problem-based learning is another pedagogy of engagement. A course is designed around a cluster of problems. As students advance, they tackle increasingly difficult problems, using increasingly sophisticated techniques and increasingly complex knowledge bases. Collaborative learning is also a pedagogy of engagement. Students learn in teams and help each other as they learn.
III.
The internet started to be widely used in the 1990s, roughly at the same time as the initial expansion of service learning and other pedagogies of engagement. The explosion of online courses and programs also started at about that time, at Harvard as well as at other educational institutions.
It initially appeared that online education would truly disrupt higher education. Students could sign up for courses almost anywhere in the world taught by faculty at institutions like Harvard, or courses bundled together and taught by faculty from many different campuses. Harvard and MIT joined forces to create the learning platform edX and offer a wide range of free online courses and certificate programs for a fee. The University of California, the University of Cambridge, and Columbia University also became parties to the collaboration, as did Google.
Most colleges and universities, and many high schools, now offer at least some online courses, a vital resource around the world, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. But research began to show that online education had significant limits, even when new tools were developed and the uses of Zoom became so ubiquitous that Zoom became a verb as well as a noun. Motivation is a key to learning. Students too often do not feel motivated or engaged when learning online, unless an external motivator like a job is the reward. Hybrid courses that combine online learning with in-person learning have been shown to be more effective, but even those courses were found to be inadequate in many fields where active learning is essential for successful learning that lasts a lifetime.
In recent years, pedagogies that use artificial intelligence have exploded in colleges and universities. It is too early to tell whether these pedagogies will be truly disruptive in higher education. My prediction is that they will. AI already provides multiple ways in which students’ learning can be accelerated. A simple example is that a teacher might assign a paper topic for students and then ask the students to tell an AI model to improve their papers, as well as fact-check them. The students would then submit both their original papers and the ones with the revisions by AI that the students accepted. Alternatively, a teacher assigns a paper written by the AI model and then asks students to improve the paper. Much more complex approaches are emerging regularly, such as those involving groups of students engaged in interactive learning with AI to solve problems. Along with new approaches to improving teaching and learning have come campus centers that support faculty and students to the same end. The Bok Center for Teaching and Learning at Harvard is an outstanding example.
IV.
Statistics give a sense of Harvard and higher education. In the decades just before and just after we graduated, enrollments in higher education exploded. In the two decades between 1948 and 1968, they grew from 2.6 million to 7 million. The college-age population grew in that period, and so did the numbers of high school graduates who decided they needed a college education to fulfill their aims. Taking a longer view, college enrollments doubled every decade and a half between 1879 and 1970. These figures mask major shifts in the types of higher education institutions. In the early nineteenth century, for example, faith-based institutions dominated, of which Harvard was one. That sharply changed in the decades that followed.
Currently there are about 4,000 colleges and universities in the United States. No less striking than the explosion of students and campuses across the country has been the shift in fields of students’ concentration. Today more U.S. undergraduates major in professional fields than in the liberal arts, with business in the lead, followed by nursing and engineering.
The future, however, will be sharply different. Undergraduate enrollments are expected to drop by about 15 percent between now and 2030 because of demographics. The impact on Harvard will be negligible, but across the country some broad-access small, private liberal arts colleges may die, and many broad-access public colleges and universities will face severe financial cutbacks, if not closures.
By the late 1950s, Harvard was accepting 40 percent of its applicants and Radcliffe only 18 percent (which essentially meant that Radcliffe was harder to get into than Harvard), and even as recently as the early 1970s, the ratio of undergraduates was four men to every woman. At Harvard, our freshman class had 1,200 students, all men. Four students were African American. Now the freshman class is 2,000 students, a nearly equal number of men and women, of whom 14 percent are African American, 37 percent Asian American, 16 percent Hispanic or Latino, and 1 percent Native American. In our freshman year, tuition was $600. Today, the total cost of tuition, room, and board is $83,000; 55 percent of undergraduates receive some financial aid. Few did in our time. Further, more than half of all Harvard undergraduates receive enough financial aid to make Harvard affordable, and many can graduate without any debt. As a result, more than 20 percent of undergraduates now come from families with incomes in the lower half of the income distribution.
I could not find data on the geographical distribution of Harvard undergraduates when we were there, but a few years earlier, when the Red Book was written, 48 percent came from New England, 24 percent from the Middle Atlantic states, and the rest from the other regions, with only 4 percent from the West. Today that distribution is: 17 percent from New England, 20 percent from the Middle Atlantic, 16 percent from the South, 9 percent from the Midwest, 2 percent from Central U.S., 15 percent from the Pacific, and 18 percent from other countries. Scores of other comparative statistics could be cited to underscore differences between Harvard College then and now. One more will suffice. In 1952, the Harvard endowment was $300 million. Today it is $56.7 billion.
Like every college and university, Harvard has always had weaknesses as well as extraordinary strengths. One that stood out to me, as an undergraduate, was inattention to public service even in the field of government, which was my major. Phillips Brooks House was a center of active involvement in tutoring kids and cleaning up parks. But there was little attention to the role of Harvard students, as a vocation or avocation, in public service. The Littauer Center was the home of the School of Public Administration, but it did not admit undergraduates. Nor does the Harvard Kennedy School today, though it represents perhaps the nation’s strongest set of programs in public policy for graduate students.
V.
Finally, a few words about intercollegiate athletics. In the cacophony of concerns for academic leaders, the current crisis in intercollegiate athletics may get lost. In my first year as president of Indiana University, our athletic director told me the football team needed an indoor practice facility. When I naïvely asked why, since football is played outside, he responded that other Big Ten Conference campuses already had such a facility, and we could compete only if we had one, too. We raised money and built it.
Years later, the executive director of the Big Ten urged member presidents to bring in Penn State University. The president of the University of Michigan and I resisted on the grounds that traveling to Penn State was too time-consuming for our players. We were outvoted by those who argued that TV revenues from an expanded Big Ten made the move worthwhile.
Intercollegiate athletics today are a wildly different world than even a decade ago. The concept of student-athletes has been rapidly transformed by money invested into athletes who are required to go to college to play sports. Money increasingly undercuts the academic purposes of colleges, student-athletes have become paid gladiators, and their coaches have become multimillionaires. The Big Ten now has 18 members, stretching from coast to coast, and their players spend more time on airplanes than they do in classrooms. In all the major conferences, the arms race to spend more and more money is accelerating, even though athletic revenues exceed expenses at only a handful of campuses.
Fortunately, the Ivy League has so far avoided the worst of these changes, as have small liberal arts colleges. But even in those arenas, the arms race is becoming increasingly troublesome for those of us who remember with fondness the days when the primacy of academics over athletics was not an issue and money was not a driving force in college sports.
***
We were fortunate to have Harvard and Radcliffe educations. They served most of us well in terms of our personal lives, our professional lives, and our civic lives. Like all institutions, and all heroes, Harvard had and still has flaws. But it remains an extraordinary place of teaching and learning, of scholarship and public service.
As I write, Harvard is under assault from the federal government. Harvard will survive, as will our federal government. I hope it is not long before they are working together again. As Derek Bok wrote about all leading universities in the last lines of his recent book, Attacking the Elites: What Critics Get Wrong—and Right—About America’s Leading Universities, “With enough humility to acknowledge their faults, more determined efforts to improve the quality of their education, and greater skill in informing the public of their progress, they should be able to build the trust that will help them survive their current predicament and emerge better and stronger than ever.”
