An Academic Vision for Harvard

When President Lawrence H. Summers outlined his plans for reinvigorating undergraduate education in his inaugural speech, he stated that no Harvard student would be proud to admit not having read Shakespeare or not having learned the meaning of Kant’s categorical imperative. He also noted that an ignorance of science—not knowing a gene from a chromosome or the meaning of exponential growth—was common, even fashionable, among the student body.

The sad truth, however, is that Summers was overly optimistic. Not only do many Harvard students lack the necessary literacy in the natural sciences, students can and do graduate from the College without encountering either Shakespeare or Kant—and without a basic understanding of or exposure to many of the world’s great intellectual achievements. If Summers wishes to leave an academic mark upon the College, he should work with the Faculty to reform undergraduate education on a fundamental level, combining the abolition of the current Core Curriculum and stronger instruction in science with a new requirement that would introduce undergraduates to the classic texts and ideas that serve as a foundation for learned discourse.

The Core

The Core Curriculum, at the center of the liberal education we receive at the College, was never designed to cover a specific list of texts or to convey a set body of facts. Instead, it was designed to teach “approaches to knowledge” that would allow students to understand the methods of inquiry employed by the different disciplines and to apply these methods themselves once they have left the University’s gates.

This purpose is a sound one, and the Core’s greatest failing is an inability to achieve it. Because of the structure of the current Core, students must select from an often arbitrary list of acceptable courses in order to graduate. Core courses are frequently far larger than their departmental counterparts, with all the impersonal bureaucracy that large classes bring. Smaller, more intensive or higher-level departmental courses would be equally effective (if not more so) at communicating “approaches to knowledge”—yet they are often marked off-limits to undergraduates with limited space in their schedules for electives.

An end to the current Core would not mean an end to current Core courses; most could be rolled into the departments or continued as General Education courses and cross-listed for distribution credit. A department-centered distribution requirement would therefore fulfill the mission of the Core without unduly restricting student choice. As a place of intellectual inquiry, Harvard should never hold students back from pursuing ideas—and as we argued last spring, a distribution requirement would allow students to pursue different ideas and approaches to knowledge as deeply as they chose. We are glad that Summers recognized in his inaugural address that any curriculum “can be improved”; now he and the Faculty must carry forward that recognition through fundamental change in the Core.

The Sciences

Summers’ concerns regarding science education were also well-founded. In the coming decades, science and technology will play increasingly pivotal roles in daily life, and many undergraduates leaving Harvard in the next few years will find themselves unprepared for a technological future. Given the rapid advance of knowledge, especially in the life sciences, Harvard’s graduates will find knowledge of science important in a variety of contexts in the future. The understanding of the human mind and the human genome, the response to AIDS, the revolution in communications—all of these will give rise to the great political questions of our age and will require educated decisions, decisions that many Harvard students are not currently prepared to make.

In a post-Core world, this means that the distribution requirement in the sciences must make available courses intended for non-science concentrators. Chemistry 10: “Foundations of Chemistry” may be helpful for students continuing in the sciences (and certainly would qualify for distribution credit), but basic chemistry does not produce scientifically literate citizens. Instead, non-science concentrators should have access to small, strong courses that will help them understand the context of future breaking research.

These courses will need to cater to students whose focus is in the humanities and social sciences, in a College where no natural science exams are required for admission. More importantly, the subjects of these courses should shift along with trends in research, maintaining a forward-looking perspective and giving students the ability to participate productively in future social debates.

We recognize the fundamental importance of learning and understanding the scientific method. But courses must teach content as well as method, and the content of the required courses—in the Core or its successor—should be structured so as to provide students with a degree of scientific understanding that can be retained past the final exam and be applied to the pressing issues that technological advance will bring.

The Great Books

As the science curriculum is revised, the humanities cannot be left behind. Though the abolition of the Core and its replacement with a distribution requirement would be a significant step toward improving undergraduate education at Harvard, it should not be the only step. It is entirely possible to meet all of the Core requirements while still avoiding some of the most important elements of the world’s intellectual heritage.

This shortcoming does Harvard’s undergraduates a grave disservice. When students are welcomed into the “company of educated men and women” at Commencement, does it mean that they have achieved an understanding of the various “approaches to knowledge”—or at least enough understanding to receive passing grades in the Core? Or are there any works or ideas with which “educated men and women” can be expected to be familiar? We believe that there are indeed certain texts and contexts that are essential, that provide a common foundation and intellectual framework for further learning, and the Faculty should give students access to these ideas outside the context of the Core in a separate year-long “Great Books” requirement.

Luckily, the Faculty has a means of adopting this requirement without further restricting students’ already limited course choices. In order to be most useful in future study, the course should be taught during undergraduates’ first year at the College, when they are already required to take Expository Writing. Instead of adding another required course, the Faculty should remove one literature requirement from the Core or its replacement and integrate Expos into its new year-long course.

The purpose of this change would not be to destroy Expos, but to fulfill it. Although some Expos sections may introduce first-years to difficult and important ideas, many more appear to students as intellectual wastelands, more concerned with the definition of plagiarism or the mechanics found in college-level writing than with the thinking required of college-level argument. A year-long course will offer plenty of time for instruction in writing as well as (or, indeed, as part of) instruction in the texts. A student’s best writing will come when he or she is intimately engaged with a text and genuinely enjoys working with it. Good writing requires good thinking, and good thinking requires something to think about. There can be no better material than the world’s classic works to provoke thought, discussion and enthusiasm for writing.

The most difficult question for the Faculty in shaping the new requirement, however, is which texts should be chosen. Hundreds of books have a claim to inclusion in the canon, and even in a year, there are only so many works that students can read in any depth. The course should focus on works of the highest literary, philosophical and historical merit and with the greatest ability to illuminate those cultures and traditions that have affected the intellectual development of the world which Harvard students will enter. They should be chosen by a high-level committee of professors and administrators, one fully conscious of its vital role in shaping a Harvard education. While the committee should put no arbitrary limits on the number or types of works chosen, we would strongly oppose any sort of tokenism; the works should be chosen for their quality and influence, and not for any political motive. Given the sheer scope of possible choices, the committee should also offer a separate list of works in addition to the standard course, a small number of which can be added at the instructor’s discretion. This flexibility would allow for differences in the instructors’ expertise and interest and would make the course more rewarding for both the teacher and the students.

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We know it will be difficult to replace the Core, revise the required science courses or build a new canon for a course in Great Books. But Harvard has an obligation to decide what to teach its undergraduates and provide a foundation for informed exploration. The program for change described above would give students the freedom to pursue more advanced studies and to seek literacy in the sciences. It would also introduce them, perhaps for the first and only time, to the works and ideas that serve as vocabulary for their future learning. It would stoke intellectual curiosity and help Harvard, as Summers put it in his address, to light students minds on fire. And most importantly, it would be a step toward ensuring that every Harvard graduate can claim full membership in the company of educated men and women.