Harvard Guts: More Than You've Bargained For?

They meet in Sanders Theater, Paine Hall, Emerson 105 and the Science Center. They all have cute nicknames. And they are almost always lotteried.

They are Harvard's "guts." And everyone wants to take them.

But the professors who teach them--and many former students--say that these courses, which Harvard students search for in the CUE guide and The Confidential Guide each semester, are not as easy as the reputations they enjoy.

Every first-year student has heard the stories of lectures no more difficult than listening to a piano recital a few days a week, a literature class which shows the film "Robocop" in order to underscore some of the major themes of the course, and a professor who actually takes his students to a brewery on field trips.

But what first-year students hear, professors usually get wind of too. And most of those scholars whose courses have earned the title "gut" say they are trying to change their courses' images.

Professors of even the most notorious gut classes acknowledge that feedback from the CUE guide, students and teaching fellows pressures them gradually to toughen requirements in order to have a more structured course and rid themselves of the dreaded title "gut."

And so, while "Heroes for Zeroes," "Sex" and "Jesus and the Easy Life" may all face lotteries this year, the lucky students who win a seat in their class of choice may get more than what they bargained for.

`Heroes for Zeroes'

For most current students, the paradigm gut class has always been Literature & Arts C-14: "The Concept of the Hero in Greek Civilization," a class more commonly known as "Heroes for Zeros." But undergraduates responding to last year's class in the CUE guide rated the course at 3.0 for workload and 2.8 for difficulty--only slightly below the 3.1 and 3.0 respective averages for all of last fall's Core courses.

Gregory Nagy, Jones professor of Classical Greek Literature and professor of Comparative Literature, claims that the course's lingering reputation as a gut may surprise students once they have enrolled. Starting last year, Nagy beefed up the course requirements, and the one-time gut may never be the same.

Nagy asserts that although the course will assign one less paper this year, the readings have been getting gradually more comprehensive.

"Some people go into the course expecting a gut....They may get an academic challenge they weren't expecting," Nagy says. "It requires a great deal of thinking. You have to do a very close reading of the texts."

And students who took "Heroes" last year echo Nagy's sentiment.

"You hear so much hype about it from the Confi Guide, the CUE guide and upperclass publicity that I went into it thinking it would be a gut," said Matt D. Tousignant '93. "It's not a gut at all. I'm not even looking at the CUE guide anymore."

But, while "Heroes" may be shedding its easy reputation, head teaching fellow Lynn M. Sawlivich '83 says he has seen a hidden benefit for "Heroes" in the easy street aura that has hung over the course.

"I actually kind of enjoy the reputation `Heroes' has as a gut class," says Sawlivich. "It attracts students, and they end up being really interested by the course material."

Word about possibly stiffened grading and tougher course assignments travels quickly though, and several first-year students noted that their advisors had warned them about beefed-up requirements.

"But everyone in my dorm still thinks it's a gut," said Sergio Camancho '94.

`Jesus and the Easy Life'

Thomas Professor of Divinity Harvey G. Cox says he too has overhauled the structure of his popular course Moral Reasoning 30: "Jesus and the Moral Life," working on the theory that increasing the number of assignments will help students learn better.

And two years ago, Cox abolished the five-student non-directed sections that once gave "Jesus and the Easy Life" its reputation as the ultimate Harvard gut.

"It's very hard to get an `A' in that class," Cox says. "If the class ever had that [gut] reputation, it certainly won't after [last spring]."

Cox dismisses the Confi Guide's write-up of "Jesus" as reflecting the opinions of just one or two students, but he says he does consult the CUE guide evaluations in planning his course each year.

The class, which currently requires two papers, a midterm and a final, boasts a newly revamped source book as a result of feedback from the CUE guide, Cox said.

"Jesus" scored a 2.9 in both workload and difficulty in this year's CUE guide, compared to the only slightly higher 3.1 and 3.0 respective averages for fall Core classes.

But old reputations die hard, and many undergraduates still consider Cox's class the most "relaxing" way to fulfill the moral reasoning course requirement.

"I read in one of those Lisa Birnbach books that `Jesus' was an easy class at Harvard," says Joanna Weiss '94.

`Sex'

Another reputed sure-fire gut is the over-crowded spring course, Science B-29: "Human Behavioral Biology," affectionately called "Sex." But here again, the professors claim their course has gotten a bad rap.

"The word `gut' is definitely a misnomer," says co-professor Terrence W. Deacon, an associate professor of Anthropology. "If you read the Confi and CUE guides, people always complain that the course wasn't like it was advertised."

Deacon said that the course requirements and level of difficulty have remained stable since the inception of the class, although he noted that last year the weekly sections were lengthened from one-and-a-half to two hours.

"I think its reputation as a gut is a double-edged sword," Deacon said. "It creates a lot of confusion for people from the humanities who come in and realize that they're actually going to have to do science."

Students who took the class last year agree that the course requirements were beyond what they had originally anticipated.

"I didn't give the class that much time because I thought it would be easy," says John C. Donahue '93. "The midterm and final were much, much harder than the weekly quizzes would lead you to believe."

But as with many supposed Harvard guts, the myth of easy "Sex" persists. Hundreds of students flock to "Sex" each year expecting nothing more than a collection of racy tidbits of sexual knowledge.

"I think our whole room is going to take `Sex' next semester," says Trey Grayson '94. "We all want to be sexual experts."

Bread and Beer

In one class, the desire to escape a gut reputation has led the professor to put the course on hold while he rethinks the course material and prepares a textbook to be used in 1992. Indeed, Bussey Professor of Biology Otto T. Solbrig was so upset when Science B-38: "Plants and Biological Principles in Human Affairs," became a popular gut that he may take it out of the Core.

Last year, many students considered "Plants" an easy way to get through the science requirement because of such enjoyable assignments as baking bread in lab to experiment with the properties of different types of flour and a field trip to a local brewery to observe the fermentation process.

But the first time Solbrig offered the course in 1989, the class was relatively small and consisted of about 50 students "genuinely interested in botany," Solbrig says.

The professor says he was dismayed last spring, because so many undergraduates took the course only to meet the requirement in the least stressful way possible.

"Too many students were taking the course because they thought it was easy and not because they were interested in plants," Solbrig said. "I am a little bit discouraged."

And students enrolled in "Plants" last year do comment that the course was notorious as a mindless way to receive credit for the Science B core, but they point out that the course was not in fact an easy "A."

"I heard that it was the easiest way to get rid of the requirement, but a lot of people were surprised grade-wise," Izzy Fernandez '93 said. "I would call it a `work gut' but definitely not a `grade gut.'"

Solbrig plans to increase the pace of the course in 1992 and possibly to switch "Plants" from the Core to the Biology Department so that only those students genuinely interested in the material would have reason to enroll.

One course that won't be upping its requirements in the foreseeable future is Professor of Psychiatry and Medical Humanities Robert Coles' General Education 105: "Literature of Social Reflection." Although the absence of a midterm or final exam has led students to call Coles" class a gut, he insists that the class--popularly called "Guilt"--is actually very demanding.

"It's not at all an easy course," Coles says. "There are sometimes hundreds of pages of reading a week. Many hundreds."

Coles says he does pay attention to write-ups from students, but says he has seen no reason to change the course in over a decade because of the continuing enthusiasm of its students.

He cites the example of a group of students who continued meeting with their section leader in a bar on John F. Kennedy St. to discuss Tolstoy's works after the course had ended.

"They met all spring to drink beer and discuss War and Peace," Coles said. "For me, that's what makes the course. Every time I think about toughening up the course...I think about that and say, `It must be working.'"