Professors Flesh Out the Core

Three professors below preview Core courses they will offer this year in-Literature and Arts, Science and Social Analysis, discussing how they will implement the Core.

Edward O. Wilson, Baird Professor of Science, readily acknowledges that his scientific colleagues at Harvard will seldom leap at the chance of teaching an elementary science course. Even the bait of a high status Core course is not enough to lure them to face the ignorant masses. But Wilson doesn't feel that way. He presents himself as "one of a minority" among the professors in his department who has supported the Core from the beginning.

Wilson says most of his associates in the Biology and Biochemistry Departments "tend to be deeply engrossed in research" and have difficulty translating their activity into a language they think undergraduates can understand. But Wilson's Science Core course, Science B-15, "Evolutionary Biology," proposes to do just that by integrating current research on social behavior in organisms into an introductory biology course.

Wilson offered his course under Gen Ed as Natural Sciences 6. But Wilson this year has adjusted the course to fit more precisely the Core guidelines.

According to Wilson, "Evolutionary Biology" departs most radically from Gen Ed because it teaches students how to assemble knowledge, not memorize the facts and principles accrued in an academic discipline. His course will develop this feature of the Core by "attempting to present one branch of science as a creative activity," he explains.

Wilson will "describe how science is done," using examples from his current research--such as his studies of chemical communications among social insects--and relating them to human social organization. In this way, Wilson says he intends "to orient evolutionary biology against the background of social sciences." Before the Core, Wilson points out, a Natural Science Gen Ed course would "present a segment of knowledge and leave it up to the students to figure out how it might apply to broader social issues, if it indeed applied at all." But the Core proposes--and Wilson agrees--that Core professors are responsible for establishing that connection.

The Core committee on Sciences last spring ruled that Science Core courses must include a laboratory section. "Evolutionary Biology" includes four lab sessions, each devoted to an area of specialized current research. One session will cover behavior hormones and reproduction in lizards, based on present research by David P. Crews, assistant professor of Biology.

Another session will look at Wilson's pet research topic, division of labor in ant colonies. He plans to bring in his experimental colonies of South American leaf-cutting ants. In Nat Sci 6, Wilson was famous for a unique lecture-demonstration style--one that should adapt nicely to the new labs. He waves his arms above his head and zigzags about the floor to simulate the way the bugs use their antennae to sniff out trails left by fellow ants. Though this may strike some as collegiate show-and-tell, Wilson asserts that by introducing actual research to his students, they can gain exposure to the imaginative and active process of scientific experimentation, yet still "talk in terms of general principles."

Wilson concedes he eventually would have come to these conclusions on his own, Core or no Core, but certainly not as rapidly as this year. The Core also prompted him to give sociobiology special prominence in the course, as a way of associating biological studies with social science.

The course will include some history of science by tracing the development of ecological and environmental theories. This satisfies the Core report's recommendation that scientists tie in the historical context whenever possible.

Wilson's enthusiasm in the biology labs on Oxford St. so far has not proved infectious. "It hasn't exactly caught fire with the biologists or biochemists," Wilson notes with regret. "Frankly, they haven't given it much thought."

Without the Core, Maria M. Tatar, professor of German, believes she would never have developed her Core offering, "Weimar Culture," Literature and Arts C-13, although she has wanted to teach such a course for some time. "The Core provided the impetus to go ahead. It somehow legitimized it, gave my idea institutional backing," she says.

The Contexts of Culture courses must place literature and the arts of a particular culture in its social and historical context. Some have suggested this requires a tortured effort to combine an era's history, social life, literature and fine arts.

Tatar managed to pack expressionistic poetry, architecture and the Bauhaus, Weimar opera and cinema, and an analysis of the economy's inflation and stabilization into her "Weimar Culture" course.

Her reading list likewise runs from Thomas Mann's short stories to Remarque's familiar All Quiet on the Western Front. But this won't be a frolic through translated works: The texts are all read in German, although Tatar will conduct class discussions in English.

The course calls for mastery of German and Tatar recommends a minimum of three to four years high school or two years of college German. But she still maintains that the course is "in the spirit of the Core." Though the stiff language requirement cuts down sharply the course enrollment--Tatar expects no more than 20--the class still has a broad enough appeal to qualify as a Core course.

"The course won't be purely focused on literary analysis," Tatar says, but will examine historical documents and discuss links between cultural developments in the Weimar Republic. These qualities of the course fulfill the Core requirement that Contexts of Culture courses be "interdisciplinary and cross-cultural."

The Core committee was convinced. They passed her course without reservation, though they urged her to offer the course in English translation. Tatar intends to make that shift in two years.

The guidelines on the Contexts of Culture section purpousely were left loose to encourage "imaginative enterprise on the part of faculty members."

Tatar credits the Core with inspiring a new interdisciplinary approach in the German Department. "Normally our courses emphasize literary analysis," Tatar observes, noting that her course will be one of "the first attempts in our department to bring in the historical and interdisciplinary dimensions."

The Core report instructs professors that their Core courses should not just present a set of facts but must provide a "basic literacy in major forms of intellectual discourse." Tatar says she prefers to avoid such inflated prose and is unsure how such notions apply to the humanities, or for that matter what intellectual discourse even means. But she believes she may have unintentionally conformed to the report's exhortation by "familiarizing students with two methodologies: historical and literary." Tatar shrugs. "I always thought the point of education in general was to teach people to think critically. If you want to call that intellectual discourse, then I guess that is what I am doing."

Asked to summarize briefly what topics he will cover in his course, Social Analysis 12, "Crime and Human Nature," James Q. Wilson, Shattuck Professor of Government, winces before answering: "You know, all the biggies: crime, war, revolution, sex." He admits it all sounds somewhat overreaching and "a little apocalyptic," but believes he and his co-instructor, Richard J. Herrnstein, professor of Psychology, can keep everything under control with guidance from the Core report.

Wilson and Herrnstein's course emerges from a Gen Ed course the two professors began teaching three years ago on crime and public policy. Over the years they let the public policy issue slide as they became increasingly absorbed with what Wilson calls "the special case of crime."

This year they plan only minor revisions, unrelated to the Core requirements. Wilson explains that his course already fits the Core. Following the Core guidelines' dictates that Social Analysis courses be organized around a central theme, Wilson's course will ask, Why does a certain person commit a crime?

Unlike many introductory social science courses "with their laundry list of unrelated bits of knowledge," Wilson claims his course will discuss different aspects of crime only as they relate to this central issue. Wilson will lead his students through possible answers--including theories of personality, social environment, neighborhood formation, economics and genetics. On the way, the students will pick up some psychology, microeconomics and law.

In Social Analysis, the Core guidelines also ask professors to "test and illuminate" these formal theories with empirical data. Wilson again is in step with the Core here. For example, with genetics he will teach his students how to decode the genetic contribution and then observe complexities that arise in attempting to separate genetics and environment.

Finally, the Core report asks that the Social Analysis offerings "suggest the value questions or options that are implicit in the analysis." Wilson believes that this mandate to search for the values under theories is one of the major strengths of the Core, because it forces professors to focus their courses on "the philosophical implications, not just the facts."