The Culture of the Core

As I stood in line at the Coop, bracing myself for the bi-annual ordeal known as buying books, my friend jokingly suggested that I, having been born and raised in Tokyo, could take the class Foreign Cultures 84, “Tokyo” to fulfill my Foreign Cultures Core requirement. Considering the irony of this facetious proposal, I quickly noticed the Asian boy in front of me cradling a stack of books all bearing the word “China” in their titles. After casually striking up a conversation with him, I learned that he wanted to take a Core class and had enrolled in “Foreign Cultures 63: China’s Two Social Revolutions,” which would also help him learn more about his Chinese background.

If students have the option of studying their own cultures to fulfill the Foreign Cultures requirement, I had to question the point of Foreign Cultures. After flipping through a nearby 2003-2004 Courses of Instruction book, I learned that one of the goals of the Foreign Cultures requirements is to “provide fresh perspectives on one’s own cultural assumptions and traditions, through a study of cultures significantly different from that of the U.S. and the Anglophone cultures of the British Isles, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.”

But, just as I don’t consider my hometown a foreign metropolis, I’m confident that my new friend, fluent in Mandarin and very close with his immigrant grandfather, thinks of Chinese culture as anything but foreign. As I was leaving the Coop, I suddenly realized that it was presumptuous—not to mention unfair—for anyone to assume that all Harvard undergraduates would regard these classes as “foreign.”

Yet, despite the fact that 7.1 percent of the Class of 2007 is, in fact, “foreign” according to the admissions office—meaning that they are not from the United States or Canada— and that 34.9 percent other students identify themselves as Asian-American, African-American, Puerto Rican, Mexican-American, Hispanic-American or Native American, the preamble to the Foreign Cultures section presumes that all students at the University identify most closely to the “U.S. and Anglophone cultures.”

Although Susan Lewis, director of the Core Program, pointed out that minority students could very well have not gained any exposure to their parents’ or grandparents’ cultures while growing up, it is unfair to assume so. Yet the title “Foreign Cultures” does just that; it suggests that any subject matter that isn’t American or Anglophone is indeed foreign. The description of Foreign Cultures further demonstrates the Core Program’s assumption, stating that the “courses also introduce methods of studying a culture, and the issues involved in approaching a culture not one’s own.” The statement indicates that students should regard Foreign Cultures are “not one’s own,” a somewhat offensive assertion to all those who do identify with the cultures listed in these courses: Korean, Vietnamese, East European Jewish, Muslim, German, South Asian and Scandinavian, just to name a few.

Perhaps the Foreign Cultures component of the Core Program is well-intentioned—considering it was created in the 1970s in order to expose a more homogeneous student body to non-Western ways of life—however it may be time for a bit of modification. While its aims to introduce students to different cultures are still relevant, Foreign Cultures would better serve the undergraduate population by undergoing an alternation of title and mission statement.

Loui Itoh ’07, an editorial editor, lives in Apley Court.