Questions For Sidney Verba

Dear Sir:

The Working Paper on the Core program drawn up by yourself and the other members of the Review Committee is a report that we had anxiously anticipated in the hope of constructive proposals for reform. After reading the Paper, however, we must confess our disappointment with the Committee's adherence to and defense of a broken status quo, as well as our disturbance at the patronizing attitude with which students' opinions about the Core have been dismissed.

The student interest in Core reform is selfish only to the extent that we desire an institutional framework that will provide us with the best education. Like your Committee, we strongly believe that a delimited liberal arts education is the brand of learning most suited to our great University. But unlike your Committee, we are not bound to any specific system of knowledge categorization by intra-Faculty political allegiances, nor are we afraid to rattle our sabers for fear of internecine Faculty dissension.

The eight Core courses required of undergraduates account for a full fourth of the time we spend here--not to mention the approximately $30,000 in tuition, room and board which that year represents. Because we do care about our education, and because we are concerned with Harvard's future, we feel obliged to raise a few questions that the Faculty Council might consider when reviewing your relatively meager and insufficient proposals for Core reform:

* The conclusion to the first section, Historical Background and Original Intent, admits, "The substance of the Core has changed since its inception [in 1974] as scholarship has changed" (p. 16). Even within a 20-year span, the grand scheme for educating Harvard students has had to accommodate progress in the academy. It is de facto a malleable entity, intended to provide breadth of knowledge and approaches thereto in the face of ever-changing facts, theories and hierarchies of importance.

Yet in the Paper's conclusion, you maintain that the current areas of the Core remain valid. The ways-of-thinking criteria draws ridiculous if not imaginary distinctions between classes in Historical Studies B and departmental classes like History 1619: "The American Revolution". Similarly, contradictions within the Core abound. Couldn't a Literature and Arts B class on the Ottoman Court be listed as Foreign Cultures as well? Perhaps there is unnecessary overlap here, especially considering the sparse number of Foreign Cultures courses offered each semester, and their tendency to parse students into classes by virtue of their own ethnicity. And couldn't a philosophy department class suit a "moral reasoning" requirement just as well as Moral Reasoning 22: "Justice"? Consider the moral relativism already embodied in that category; then consider the limited number of Moral Reasoning classes offered this semester-one.

* The Paper lists the basic features of a Core course as "teacher, students, content and review process" (p. 28). Beyond the intellectual illegitimacy of such a vacuous definition, it is obvious to us from this that the only difference between a Core course and a departmental one is the element of the review process. Not incidentally, it is this very review process--one whose vision is blind-sided by the awful Core categories--that is responsible for the limited number of Core offerings and the unwillingness of Faculty members to propose courses. As Director of the Core Program Susan W. Lewis recently noted, "There's no reason why a professor would want to subject himself to the kind of scrutiny that a Core course requires."

Departmental courses seem not to be good enough for the Core in your understanding, yet almost every student will tell you that they are superior. You counter that they are too advanced for a novice to the field, and that the introductory courses are directed at concentrators. To the former claim, may we say that students here are not so stupid as to dive into a course for which they are ill prepared, unless they are willing to put in extra work. To the latter, we ask what better way is there to attain the varied approaches to knowledge than to survey a field's theoretical canon?

* Beyond the nominal concern you express for not allowing students to be smothered by departmental curriculums, you voice concern that a Core program with distribution requirements and/or bypasses would go the way of the General Education program because of "no incentive for faculty to commit to the extra burdens of preparing and teaching Core courses" (p.40). But what incentive there is now, namely the opportunity to teach a great many students a great many things about a field from your perspective, would still exist under a distributional system with or without a supplemental Core.

If a student were allowed to take an introductory psychology class for Core biological science credit, might it not be a popular class that even senior faculty members might devote their time to? If they were not so interested, might not the Dean of the Faculty attempt to persuade them to do so, either through the Core or outside of it? Might not the Dean of the Faculty be able to use a Core slush fund to provide "incentives," like the existence of additional paid teaching fellow positions for graduate students? It seems that the only loser would be the Core Program Review Committee; would its loss of power be a bad thing for Harvard education?

Of course we have additional questions, like about the value of taking courses with senior Faculty over their junior compatriots, and about the ability of the Core Program to recruit additional courses given the regulatory burdens it imposes, and about the supposed substantive nature of Core courses, and about the viability of a ways-of-thinking criterion for the Core in the face of intra-field multiplications of approach, and about the intellectual rationale for adding a Quantitative Reasoning Core subfield but allowing students to opt out of an additional one of their choosing, and about the willingness of the Core subcommittees to expand their understanding of what qualifies as a bypass, and about the ability of the Dean to reduce Core section size without additional funding or distribution requirements or more Core classes. But perhaps we should discuss these further issues after the Faculty Council has the chance to inspect the Verba Paper and ask some of the tougher questions.