Core Curriculum, I Loathe You

I loathe you firstly, Core Curriculum, because you know not who you are. Once you were a Christian education, then a liberal and general education, and now you are assorted “modes of inquiry”—a term that would be vapid even if it delivered on its promised goods. Is it not baneful that you, Core, are telling lies, that your “approaches to knowledge” exist in name only, that your pedagogy is a ruse which keeps asunder the rigor of departmental courses and the silliness of your look-alikes?

Core Curriculum, you are a motley and arbitrary collection, and I loathe you because you equate gendered communities in North Africa with the history of Western civilization. I loathe you because when I ask you if indigenous Australians had a Bach (which is a rhetorical question), I can very much imagine you offering up, without a hint of irony, a study of Aboriginal didgeridoos.

I loathe and pity you, Core, because your pedagogues implicitly admit that you are a deeply flawed creature, even if they will not hazard a forthright statement. They know that for every “Justice” there are five “Chinese Imaginary Spaces.”

But will they let the guillotine fall?

Sixty years ago, the University boldly declared “that general education has been neglected in Harvard College.” The total overhaul that flowed from this admission was groundbreaking and visionary; the report General Education in a Free Society was so widely published that it was given a resonant nickname, The Red Book.

In those post-war days, academia faced a real intellectual crisis, and it culminated in a no-holds-barred interrogation of why education matters to us, of how it was leading (sometimes astray) our best and brightest.

Core Curriculum, use those modes of inquiry of yours to look at the opus that brought your predecessor into being. Your progenitor, Core, is caricatured as archaic and uncouth, but the issues we grapple with today—internationalism, ethnocentrism, post-modernism—are all addressed in The Red Book with surprising comprehension, even if unfashionable “ism”-less terms are used.

Yet, however much I loathe you, I worry even more about your inheritor. My deepest fear, Core, is that the Gen Ed vanguard of today will produce a report so dodgy, so obsequious to “internationalism,” that it will only recreate you into an even greater monstrosity.

Am I wrong, Core Curriculum? Larry Summers, with his refreshingly willful behavior, was the one hope for grand vision, and he has already excused himself from the Curricular Review altogether.

And as in the era of your inception, Core, the academic atmosphere is hardly electric these days. In April 2004, this is the most booming declaration your doctors of pedagogy could muster: “It is essential that the Faculty provides students with guidance about the important concepts, texts, and knowledge that might underpin a liberal arts and sciences education.” Might? Core Curriculum, I sense a cop-out.

In what’s envisioned as your successor, Core, multitudinous choices and lack of focus will metastasize, not shrink. That important knowledge that might be a liberal arts education is, in truth, just a banal consortium of recommended “Harvard College Courses.”

Take, for instance, the Gen Ed committee’s dream of a “world literature course,” which “might look at cultural representation in different places and periods, and cultural flows across traditional national boundaries and among hierarchies of cultures.”

So, where one myopic offering in your menagerie might focus on those didgeridoos, the Core of tomorrow might undertake a cross-study of flutes in their many incarnations, from the pan-flutes of the Roman and Greek empires to the lesser-known (but no less important) Papuan and Khoisan flutists—perhaps even Bach’s flute sonatas would make a brief appearance. All in the name of a general education!

Thankfully, the Gen Ed Committee’s so-called Gang of Five, meeting clandestinely over the summer, has brought a sense of reason to the process that only a junta can. But will promised “portal” courses be any less vapid than the pipe dream of “Harvard College Courses” promised to be? Will they be mandatory and well-taught, or merely a re-christening of things we already have, with the added dignity of being recognized, rather meaninglessly, as foundational but only recommended?

The choice between the rigor of a survey course on Western history or political philosophy and the promise of an easy “A” offered by the many peripheral courses is exactly why I loathe you, Core Curriculum. By not saying “you must take this,” you have caused us all to abandon those courses which look too hard, too legitimate. How many of your wards graduate without reading Aristotle or Shakespeare or Locke, but having learned of Mongolian architecture and samurai?

Core, I would love and not loathe you if you had a compelling, guiding purpose. Command me, Core, to take those things I’d rather not take for the sake of my GPA or my attention span; make those who come in our wake study those things that, although it’s been hushed into an open secret, are still thought to be the underpinnings of our civilization.

If only you had a voice, Core Curriculum, to declare, “Euthanize or reinvigorate me, but do neither half-way” to give your doctors of pedagogy recognition of what must be done.

Travis Kavulla ’06 is a history concentrator in Mather House. His column appears on alternate Mondays.