By Debra Bradley Ruder

Gazette Staff

The Faculty of Arts and Sciences expects to vote next week on a set of proposals that would add quantitative reasoning to the Core Curriculum and increase the number of courses in the program, thus enhancing student choice.

In many meetings, phone conversations, and e-mails over the past few weeks, faculty have discussed the draft legislation developed by the Core Review Committee, a faculty-student body that has been examining the general education program.

At the Faculty's May 6 meeting, some members expressed support for the proposals, some offered slight modifications, and one suggested an alternative to the Core Program. Dean of the Faculty Jeremy R. Knowles said he strongly supported the evolution and adaptation of the Core as put forth by the Review Committee.

The Committee proposes adding a course requirement in quantitative reasoning, raising the number of Core study areas from 10 to 11.

In addition, the Committee has sought to expand the number of Core courses to give students more choice. It proposes that the Standing Committee and its subcommittees, which review Core offerings, seek out departmental courses that may be appropriate for inclusion.

The proposal represents a middle ground in the ongoing debate over whether departmental courses should count for Core credit, according to Professor Sidney Verba, Core Review Committee chair.

"We have found that while the Faculty appears generally in favor of maintaining the basic character of the Core Program, it is divided -- rather sharply -- between those who prefer to increase the number of courses by substituting unvetted departmental courses for Core courses, and those who believe that such a departure will undermine the Core by reducing faculty incentives to teach in the Program," Verba wrote.

The Committee suggests maintaining the number of required Core courses at eight, rather than the seven it had proposed in a working paper released in March.

It also recommends that the Dean and the Standing Committee identify ways to speed up the process for reviewing proposed Core courses, and that the Dean take steps to provide incentives for faculty to teach in the Core.

Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures Mary Gaylord believes the Core should be modified to accommodate students who want to explore subjects in more depth. (Core courses are designed for those with no background in a particular subject.)

Agreeing with Gaylord, Judith Ryan, the Robert K. and Dale J. Weary Professor of German and Comparative Literature, compared her Core classes to one-room schoolhouses, where students of varying levels of knowledge converge.

K. Anthony Appiah, professor of Afro-American studies and of philosophy, is one of many faculty who applaud the quantitative reasoning proposal. Such skills, he noted, are critical for understanding such phenomena as gentrification, sentencing patterns, and the spread of disease.

Harvey Mansfield, the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Government, made the case for a "Great Books" curriculum by reading a lengthy passage from a report by the Student Committee on Undergraduate Requirements.

Some professors said they favor adding small, faculty-led courses to the Core, while others questioned whether that was feasible or necessary.

A number of faculty voiced support for a language requirement. "To know well another language and culture is a fundamental requirement of the humanities and of humanism itself," argued Gregory Nagy, the Francis Jones Professor of Classical Greek Literature and professor of comparative literature. Political scientist Stanley Hoffmann, a native of Vienna and the Paul and Catherine Buttenwieser University Professor, said he has been waiting 40 years for a language requirement.

Applause followed Jay Harris' suggestion that the Faculty examine the undergraduate curriculum as a whole. Harris, the Harry Austryn Wolfson Professor of Jewish Studies, is concerned about the fact that students take a limited number of electives and declare their concentrations as freshmen. "Students are choosing concentrations more or less out of high school," he said.

In other business, Dean Knowles announced the newly elected members of the Faculty Council: Peter Buck (History of Science), Melissa Franklin (Physics), Warren Goldfarb (Philosophy), Michael Hasselmo (Psychology), Caroline Hoxby (Economics), and Richard Thomas (Classics.)

He also thanked the faculty whose Council terms end this spring -- Daniel Donoghue, Ellen Fitzpatrick, Joseph Koerner, Donald Pfister, and Mary Waters -- and those who served replacement terms this year, Reinhold Brinkmann, Patrick Ford, Michael Hasselmo, and Shannon Jackson.

In addition, the Rev. Peter J. Gomes asked for a frank discussion about the "erosion" of the reading period, which has become shorter and apparently is used for some classes and tests. Knowles said the Committee on Undergraduate Education and the Educational Policy Committee would address this topic in the fall.

Born in Naples in 1904, Louis Francis Solano arrived in the

United States in 1906 with his parents and two older siblings.

The family settled in the West End of Boston, where his father

struggled to make a living as a day laborer. In order to

supplement the family income, the teenage Louis and his friends

took to "liberating" vegetables at the Haymarket and reselling

them. One day, while hawking stolen lemons, they were arrested

and brought before the magistrate Frederic Pickering Cabot.

Judge Cabot, who was on the Board of Overseers at Harvard,

recognized a touch of genius in the gawky 13-year old who so

capably defended himself. Cabot encouraged him to apply to the

Boston English High School, where Solano proved so capable a

student that he sailed on to Harvard at the age of 16.

It was not easy for the intensely proud son of poor Italian

immigrants to survive in the atmosphere of 1920's Harvard.

Sustained by a deeply felt religious devotion bordering on

mysticism (some early poems provide vivid testimony), Solano not

only survived but was never to leave Harvard again. Earning his

B.A. summa cum laude in 1924 and his Ph.D. in Romance Languages

in 1931, he started to teach in the Department of Romance

Languages while still a graduate student; in 1940 he was named

Associate Professor (at the time, that position carried tenure),

and was promoted to full professor in 1969. While working on his

Ph.D. dissertation, a study of Neapolitan dialects, he spent a

year in Paris on a traveling fellowship; but such excursions

outside Cambridge were rare. He was one of the few members of

the Harvard community who, from enrollment as a Freshman in

Harvard College until his retirement fifty years later, virtually

never left the university.

In 1935 he married Vincenza Colarusso, by whom he had a son

and a daughter. The marriage ended in divorce in 1939, and that

same year he married Clelia Capelli. This second marriage

produced five more daughters, and lasted until his wife's death

in 1979.

Solano's passion for language and philology started early in

life. An Irish woman in his neighborhood, advertising to teach

Gaelic, found her only student in the 10-year old boy. After a

brief time he was fluent in Gaelic. By the end of his life, he

had taught himself some twenty languages, attaining in most a

mastery that was said to be the equal of a native speaker's.

As an undergraduate and as a graduate student, Solano

specialized in Romance Philology, the study of the emergence of

the Romance Languages from their common Latin source. This field

of investigation, requiring meticulous scholarship, owed much of

its prestige in the United States to Solano's mentor Charles H.

Grandgent, who was the first chairman of the Harvard Department

of Romance Languages, President of the Modern Language

Association, and author of such pioneering works as An Outline of

the Phonology and Morphology of Old Proven‡al and An Introduction

to Vulgar Latin. Grandgent retired in 1923, yet during all of

Solano's student years his presence dominated the graduate

courses in the department. So significant was the pursuit of

Romance Philology at Harvard at this time that a separate battery

of courses leading to a Ph.D. appeared in the catalogue under

that heading; and nearly half of the graduate offerings in French

literature dealt with texts produced before 1600.

Solano greatly admired Grandgent's learning and methods; his

choice of topic for a Ph.D. dissertation--"The Phonology of

Neapolitan"--reflected both personal and intellectual loyalties.

The description of a language that had not until then been

systematically recorded was in the spirit of his admired master,

while the neglected language he described was the variant of

Italian that had been the idiom of his childhood. The

methodology is traditional, untouched by the revolutionary

developments in linguistics that had been inaugurated by

Ferdinand de Saussure and other structural linguists in the early

years of this century. To a reader in 1996, it appears touching

that Solano's dissertation, deposited in the Harvard Archives in

1931, is written by hand; presumably, it exists in a single copy.

Solano remained faithful to Grandgent's legacy throughout

his teaching career. In the 1940's and 1950's, he almost single-

handedly taught all of Harvard's offerings in the field of

Romance Philology: Old French, Old Proven‡al, Vulgar Latin, and

Comparative Romance Linguistics, to which he also added Romanian.

He attracted a devoted following of students, who joked among

themselves that he was the last native speaker of Vulgar Latin.

Still, as the years progressed his efforts ran counter to

the changes taking place in the study of language and literature.

The discipline of linguistics was subsuming and reorienting the

subject matter of philology, and the various languages of his own

department were de-emphasizing their common origin in favor of

programs that focused on the development of the individual

Romance literatures. In 1963, Solano taught his last course in

Romance Philology. Thereafter, the department would offer under

that rubric only courses in the theory and practice of language

teaching.

Nevertheless, Solano continued to be a highly appreciated

teacher in the areas of medieval language and literature; and for

those students who shared his interests in philology--or who

discovered the riches of Old French literature in his

introductory course on the subject--he remained an indispensable

storehouse of scholarly knowledge. His students remember him as

demanding, yet, in their own words, "unfailingly courteous and

patient." He frequently insisted on meeting every week with

those whose thesis he was directing. When they had nothing new

to report, he was more than willing to change the subject and

hold forth, one former student recalls, on the idiosyncracies of

folk songs in the Neapolitan dialect. During his students' Ph.D.

orals he routinely asked questions that gave the candidates free

rein to show their command of the subject. Then, as the exam was

concluding, he would slip in a question the candidate could not

answer, thus reminding the young scholar about the vastness and

complexity of the subject at an otherwise triumphal moment. In

recognition of his kindness and devotion as a teacher, his former

students published a festschrift in his honor in 1970 (Essays in

Honor of Louis Francis Solano, ed. Cormier and Holmes, University

of North Carolina Press).

Solano himself published only a few articles during his long

career, but his passion as a scholar never abated. In addition

to his philological erudition, he continued to cultivate his

learning of modern languages. Having taught himself Hebrew and

Yiddish, late in life he undertook to learn Georgian. In one of

his last courses in Old French at Harvard, he presented the

medieval courtly romance by the Georgian poet Shota Rustaveli,

The Knight in the Panther's Skin, which in many respects

resembles Chr‚tien de Troyes' 12th-century French romance Yvain.

Through correspondance with the translator of the Georgian work,

Solano was invited in 1968 to visit the Faculty of Medieval

Studies at the University of Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia.

While there he addressed, in Georgian, the International Congress

of Soviet Writers and the Supreme Soviet of the Georgian

Republic, the only person present from the non-Communist Western

world. At the end of his speech, he received a standing ovation.

After his retirement from Harvard in 1970, Solano taught at

Loyola University, Suffolk University, and the Cambridge Center

for Adult Education. In 1979, his beloved wife Clelia died and

in 1981 he married Louise Walgreen.

In his last years, while living in Quincy, Massachusetts, he

undertook regular pilgrimages to Cambridge in order to work in

his study in Widener. He once confided to his daughter Louisa

his idea of heaven: to be in Widener and hear all of the foreign

language books there read aloud by native speakers.

When he became too feeble to continue traveling to Cambridge

and had to move out of his Widener study, this cutting of his

last ties with his field of scholarship--as he poignantly told

his daughter--represented the end of his life for him. He died

not long afterward, on August 2, 1992. He is survived by his

widow and by his seven children, as well as eleven grandchildren

and seven great-grandchildren.

Respectfully submitted:

Marlies Mueller

Per Nykrog

Donald A. Stone

Susan R. Suleiman (Chair)

 

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Copyright 1998 President and Fellows of Harvard College