Progress on Core Reform

The Faculty’s decision on Tuesday to reduce the number of required Core courses is a solid first step on the road to abolish the Core.

The change, to take effect in the fall, will exempt undergraduates from one more Core requirement closest to their concentration, chosen by their department. This shift will bring the total number of Core exemptions to four. Though this adjustment will not help students who have already taken a class in the chosen Core area, it will benefit the mostly younger students who have not yet fulfilled the requirement.

By alleviating another one of the Core requirements, undergraduates will have more freedom to take courses offered by departments other than their own. Such classes will both give students a broader education and ensure that they receive the in-depth study of the material that happens most often in non-Core classes.

But without further drastic changes, the deeper problems underlying the Core curriculum will continue to fester. Although Harvard should provide its students with a broad liberal arts education, the current Core program does more harm than good. Instead of allowing students to choose among the enriching courses that are offered in Harvard’s diverse array of concentrations, as a distribution requirement would do, the Core restricts students to choosing among watered-down survey courses that barely scrape the surface of the intended subject material. Similar departmental courses with identical approaches to knowledge—exposure to which is the supposed aim of the Core—rarely count for Core credit. Students would be better served by a system in which they were exposed to more in-depth courses that better captivate the essence of a given subject area. Such an arrangement could only be reached by abolishing the stifling Core curriculum.

The Faculty’s recent decision will give undergraduates the ability to freely choose another elective, which is an important first step towards Core reform. But we see the modification only as a temporary stopgap, highlighting the fact that the Core system needs far more drastic changes.

Dissent: Let The Core Stay

The staff celebrates this recent reduction of Core requirements for one reason: There are now only seven more required Core classes to eliminate. The core offers few courses of substance, they argue, and is an inappropriate waste of academic time. Yet their attitude dangerously accepts a shallow expectation of the reduction—greater flexibility—in place of the powerfully enlightening benefits of the Core.

The Core Curriculum provides students the opportunity to take those courses farthest removed from their field of study. This mandate of courses most foreign to a student’s concentration ensures that students graduate with an open-minded perspective and truly broadened knowledge. Admittedly, this innovative means of a ensuring a liberal arts education has its flaws. Each required core subfield offers an inadequate amount of courses each semester, often leading to crowded classes, and a disappointingly limited selection. What’s more upsetting, students seldom receive credit for taking departmental classes which would reasonably fulfill a compulsory Core subfield. The Core needs to be drastically expanded to allow for a larger amount of departmental classes to count for Core credit.

Recognizing these failings, and seeking to renovate the Core, however, is one thing. Seeking to overhaul the Core, and in effect, the sole guarantee to our liberal arts education, is another. This staff may consider the reduction as encouragingly increasing course flexibility for students. Yet there is no guarantee that one extra course will be used to fulfill the purpose of a liberal arts education. And as the staff continues to support elimination of the Core, they are in fact dangerously mandating a reduction of those elements which make an undergraduate education a truly enlightening experience.

—Jasmine J. Mahmoud ’04