Reviewing the Situation

The Harvard College Curricular Review was supposed to have top billing on the Harvard marquee this year. After its launch in the fall of 2002, the review process sped ahead as the broad brushstrokes of a new curriculum were laid to canvas in the review’s first landmark report in April 2004. But the central motifs of that report—Harvard College Courses, a January-term (J-Term), internationalization, revamped advising, and scientific literacy, among others—left much to be desired. They were vaguely defined and lacked the inspiration of previous reviews which gave us the “Red Book” of 1945 and the Core Curriculum of the 1970s. All of this was supposed to change this year as a set of outstanding essays on general education by members of the Faculty gave the curricular review a much-needed lift just a couple days into the fall semester.

Alas, one Summers controversy later and several foregone opportunities to discuss the curricular review in Faculty meetings this spring, and the process still leaves us with many unanswered questions about what it will mean to be Harvard-educated in the 21st century.

Much of this year’s discussion centered on fleshing out the details of Harvard College Courses (HCC), the crown jewel of a general education platform proposed to replace the outdated Core Curriculum. Thus far the reports generated by the committee on general education have remained conspicuously vague. It is not for want of existing examples that HCC’s remain ill-defined. A quick perusal of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) Courses of Instruction present a plethora of varied syllabi taught in an array of structures—lectures, sections, tutorials, seminars, and conference courses. Professors have invented, reinvented, started from scratch, and reinvented again different models for classroom instruction; no amount of armchair theorizing will replace nearly 400 years of evolutionary progress. While a general education program poses unique challenges that may not be fully met by any single course currently offered at Harvard, the vision for HCC’s will be more clearly articulated if it draws on tangible components of Harvard’s current best offerings.

We have suggested on this page courses such as Moral Reasoning 22: “Justice,” Science B-62: “The Human Mind,” and Historical Study A-12: “International Conflict and Cooperation in the Modern World” as courses with syllabi that HCC’s would do well to model themselves after. These courses—which have a gravitas to them that “Dinosaurs and their Relatives” simply does not—approach seminal fields of inquiry through both historical and theoretical lenses and make a deliberate effort through written assignments or class discussion to apply course material to contemporary issues.

With ample resources, HCC’s may also find success in imitating a structure similar to the Social Studies sophomore tutorial, in which small tutorial seminars guided by full-fledged faculty operate semi-autonomously alongside weekly lectures. To be sure, the resource and logistical demands of operating in such a structure would be substantial, but they are far from prohibitive. Insofar as Harvard is aiming to provide a world class education to its undergraduates, the curricular review should be relentless in setting a high bar for HCC’s.

Another highly publicized and controversial component of the the curricular review has been the proposed addition of a January term. It is becoming increasingly likely that, in a move to align calendars with the other schools of the University, undergraduates will soon face the prospect of final exams before winter break for the fall term. Should exam period find a new home and the College begin opening its gates in late August, we maintain our skepticism of plans for a formalized academic January term. We are pleased that in its latest report the committee on a January term emphasized the need for a flexible and optional program. With a more torrent pace to the fall term, students will welcome a reprieve from the demands of academic life, and the best vision for January is one where a prolonged winter break opens windows of opportunity generally reserved for summer experiences, including intensive language study abroad, research opportunities, and internships.

Among the other more notable proposals on the table for the curricular review, the committee on advising and counseling has prudently turned away from its earlier suggestion of switching to Yale-style housing in which students would be assigned to Houses at the beginning of their Harvard career. The committee rightly acknowledged the advantages of Harvard’s current housing scheme, which prizes class unity in addition to House pride, and has appropriately turned its attention towards finding ways to improve freshman and upperclass advising through establishing a centralized advising administration and bolstering peer-advising programs.

The curricular review has also put forth several proposals for remodeling the teaching of writing at Harvard. We are encouraged by the proposal to add public speaking or rhetoric courses to the curriculum or to add such components to the existing Expository Writing program. However, we continue to discourage against making freshman writing courses pass/fail. We believe Expos is a valuable struggle and students come out better writers for having gone through it. Moreover, we hope that the College can find a way to bolster the resources behind the Expos program to allow all interested freshman to take Expos 20 in their fall term.

Ultimately, a year that had the potential of being the curricular review’s annus mirabilis has amounted to little more than small tweaks of last spring’s hodge-podge. To be fair, this once-per-generation undertaking is only falling behind the schedule it ambitiously set out for itself. The much-heralded 1970s review took no less than 5 years to complete, and this review should have little trouble keeping up with that timetable. We have much to look forward to in the upcoming academic year, and it seems like the Harvard community is revving up for the task. The Faculty decided last month to up the number of Faculty meetings set to take place next year from nine to 14, ostensibly not in anticipation of another embroiling controversy to blow the curricular review off course yet again, but to provide some much needed time for consideration of this landmark review.