Profs Await Report After Mailing Error

The unveiling of the new general education report left many waiting with bated breath.

Hard copies of the much-anticipated proposal to replace the Core Curriculum were set to be delivered to faculty boxes yesterday. But an apparent snafu within the Harvard University Mail system has delayed delivery for at least a day.

“We’re all baffled and plan to double check on this in the morning,” Professor of Philosophy Alison Simmons, a co-chair of the task force that drafted the report, wrote in an e-mail yesterday evening.

Simmons said her committee still had no plans to release the report online. Co-chair Louis Menand, Bass professor of English and American Literature and Language, said in an interview Tuesday that “the idea is we want this to be an internal Harvard document.”

“We’re just reluctant to put it around the world right away,” he said.

Nevertheless, the committee’s preliminary report, which would require students to take courses on religion and U.S. history as part of a new set of 10 mandatory areas of study, started making waves across the nation yesterday. In an evening dispatch, The Associated Press called the task force’s recommendations “surprisingly bold.” And The Wall Street Journal gave prominent treatment to news of the proposal on its website.

On campus, many professors were reluctant to offer their opinions of the report before they had read the actual document.

Saltonstall Professor of History Charles S. Maier ’60, a member of the Committee on General Education that drafted earlier reports, said he had obtained a copy of the report yesterday and supported most of its proposals.

But he said the report’s recommendation to replace the three Literature and Arts requirements in the current Core with a single “Cultural Traditions and Cultural Change” course needed further discussion.

“Students need to develop a sense not only of culture as tradition, but an aesthetic sensitivity as well,” he said.

Former Dean of the College Harry R. Lewis ’68, a frequent critic of the current Core Curriculum, said he was already impressed by the outlines of the proposal as described in news reports. “It’s a structure that proceeds from a sensible rationale, based on observing the ways in which the student body has changed over the years,” Lewis said over the phone last night.

The new report acknowledges that the vast majority of Harvard students will pursue professional, not academic, careers, and criticizes the Core for grounding general education in disciplinary approaches to knowledge.

Lewis, whose recent book criticizing Harvard’s curriculum, “Excellence Without a Soul: How a Great University Forgot Education,” was footnoted in the report, said he was shocked that the proposals had emerged from a six-member faculty committee that met for the first time this June.

“It’s a very short amount of time to come up with something whose whole flavor is strikingly new, and strikingly original,” Lewis said.

Simmons said she expects the reports will arrive in faculty boxes today. “My guess is that they got a little stuck in University Mail,” she said.

The Undergraduate Council, meanwhile, has begun to plan how to distribute copies of the 40-page report to the student body.

In an e-mail to student representatives, UC President John S. Haddock ’07 said he already had 100 copies of the report to give out.

Haddock wrote that 50 copies were available in University Hall, and that more would be distributed to freshmen and the Houses starting Friday.

Reached on his cell phone last night, Haddock said he hadn’t read the report yet and couldn’t comment.

—Staff writer Lois E. Beckett can be reached at lbeckett@fas.harvard.edu.

—Staff writer Anton S. Troianovski can be reached at atroian@fas.harvard.edu.