Replace the Core of the Core

Tomorrow morning marks the beginning of the end of the 2003-2004 school year, and also, notably, one of the last exam periods before the Harvard curriculum is revamped—and the Core, as we know it, is abolished. Yet the dismantling of the Core in favor of vague notions of Harvard College Courses combined with a flexible distribution requirement leaves much to the imagination. Although the Harvard College Courses will comprise the “flagship” of the new curriculum, in the 69-page report issued by the Harvard College Curricular Review (HCCR), the section devoted to describing and defining these courses is a mere three pages long. The College has the opportunity to take a bold, positive step away from the Core, and they can do so in how they choose to define these Harvard College Courses.

For one, it is important that these courses do not merely emphasize the ambiguous yet ubiquitous “approaches to knowledge” embodied in the Core, but rather introduce students to the bodies of knowledge and texts that the College deems most important. This is not to say that the College should approach a rigid “Great Books” curriculum resembling Columbia’s Core, but rather that the program should offer exposure to the different terrains of thought that have landscaped our world—and will likely continue to do so in the future. As the HCCR report notes, students “want guidance about which topics and approaches are most important for them to study.” Today’s Core does not offer that kind of guidance; “Dinosaurs and their Relatives” fulfills the same requirement as “The Human Mind” and “Origins of Knowledge.” Harvard College Courses should guide students along the intellectual hierarchy. Moreover, the exploration of such influential ideas should take place within the context of studying the most important problems and issues that students will face in the contemporary world. These concerns define “the basis of an educated citizenry,” the report suggests, and Harvard College Courses should reflect that.

Much of the promise of Harvard College Courses lies in their ability to provide a common academic experience to large swaths of students from various concentrations. It is this niche that the Core attempted (and failed) to fill; instead of facilitating intellectual dialogue which does not end with the end of class, today’s Core too often fails even to initiate dialogue during class. Although it may seem counterintuitive to provide that common experience through unrequired courses, Harvard is right to make Harvard College Courses optional. Doing so ensures higher quality since these courses will be forced to compete with departmental offerings.

Harvard College Courses should be further incentivized with the best quality instruction Harvard offers. Teaching ability of faculty should be placed at a premium in developing these courses, and the teaching fellows (TFs) hired to lead sections should be subject to the most rigorous standards. Preferably all Harvard College Course TFs will have had previous teaching experience and high levels of training—flagship teachers for flagship courses. The College should also explore non-traditional teaching formats such as sections led by professors and seminars conducted parallel to the courses.

In short, Harvard College Courses ought to fuel students’ passion for intellectual pursuits; they ought to be the highlights of the undergraduate experience both for the essentialness of the material they cover and the superiority of the instruction they offer. The curricular review ends with a note on trust, saying that it hopes to increase “the trust we place in faculty to develop innovative courses” and “the trust we place in students that they will choose wisely.” But for this curricular review to be successful, we must first place our trust in Harvard administrators to organize a framework in which the curriculum can flourish.