Forum on Core Held Tonight

The Student Committee on Undergraduate Requirements will hold an open forum tomorrow night to gather student opinions on the Core curriculum and other academic requirements.

The committee, established by the Undergraduate Council in March, is preparing a report to present to the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Core Review Committee, which began an independent review of the Core program and undergraduate requirements this fall.

Jessica R. Freireich '97, a member of the student committee, proposed the forum as a way to hear the voices of students interested in Core reform.

"All our meetings have been open to everyone, but we wanted to make the students feel that they had really been asked by other students for their input," Freireich said. "We wanted them to know that it's not just a group of 10 students researching and coming up with a plan."

"The goal of the forum is to take the best of the creative ideas that students have and pass them on to the student representatives on the faculty committee," said student committee Chair Justin C. Label '97, who was recently selected to serve on the Core Review Committee.

Although the student committee will soon wrap up its deliberations, members stressed that they have not reached any definite conclusions on Core reform.

"We're still reviewing different kinds of plans," Freireich said. "We haven't made any decisions about what we want and what we don't want."

"We've discussed options," said student committee member Robert E. Ditzion '96. "We have general sense of what we think, but we haven't reached any conclusions."

Members said that much of the committee's discussions has centered around the current Core philosophy, which "seeks to introduce students to the major approaches to knowledge."

"We have been asking, does the Core fulfill [its aim]? Should the Core fulfill it? Are there also other ways of fulfilling that?" Ditzion said.

Ditzion said that the committee has also been comparing the current Core curriculum to a broader system of distributional requirements.

"Personally, I'm leaning towards having more substitution in the Core," Freireich said.

"Whether that means moving towards distribution requirements or a simple restructuring of the Core system, I don't know," she said. "There might be a middle ground."

The committee has also been analyzing curriculum philosophies at 20 or 25 other schools, Freireich said.

Tuesday's forum will be held at 7:30 p.m. in Emerson Hall 108.

"We're going to explain who we are and what we're doing, explain the current situation of the Core and the ideas that we've been considering and then open the floor up for questions and comments," said Isabel K. Reichardt '97-'98.

Last spring, the committee conducted a random phone survey of 180 students. Thirty-seven percent of those surveyed believed that the Core has fulfilled its objectives, but more than half favored replacing the Core curriculum with distributional requirements.