Similar Structure, Different Mission—Real-World Philosophy Sets Plan Apart

Now that the General Education task force has lost its faith in religion, the long-anticipated Gen Ed overhaul looks more like the Core than it has at any point during the four-year-long curricular review.

The Faculty’s challenge, if and when the proposed curriculum is implemented, will be to recast the generation-old and much-maligned Core into a system with a radically different mission but an uncannily similar structure and nomenclature.

The task force that crafted the proposal distributed a letter before yesterday’s Faculty meeting saying it was eliminating “Reason and Faith,” the most novel component of their preliminary plan for general education released in October. It boldfaced the words “moral reasoning” in a two-line description of a category on ethics, directly borrowing from the current Core Curriculum. And it kept several other components of the Core, including the requirement of two science courses, a year of foreign language training, and one course in a category much like the Core’s “Quantitative Reasoning.”

The category most unlike any in the current Core addresses “what it means to be a human being”—but it has yet to be defined beyond the broadest strokes.

“There are only so many ways to slice the salami,” History Department Chair Andrew D. Gordon ’74 said in a phone interview after yesterday’s meeting. “There’s disciplinary approaches and there’s subject matter. Any curriculum is going to have to be some combination of those.”

At this point, the biggest difference between the Core and its proposed reincarnation—which needs to pass through further discussion and a full Faculty vote to be put in place—isn’t in its appearance, but in its mission. While the Core emphasizes “ways of knowing,” the current proposal stresses connections between academic study and the real world. Many professors will now have to think about how to revamp some of their courses to fit the new model—particularly since the committee said the number of courses to count for general education “should be much larger than is the case with the Core.”

“There needs to be some real principle for how these courses are shaped in the context of the Core,” religion professor Diana L. Eck, master of Lowell House, said over the phone last night. She added that she might alter one of her Core courses, Foreign Cultures 12, “Sources of Indian Civilization,” to include a focus on the impact of the Indian diaspora on American life.

Supporters of the proposed curriculum are insisting that the report not be judged by any superficial similarities to the existing framework. Rather, they say, the new proposal presents a guiding philosophy far removed from its forebear.

“This is emphatically NOT the Core,” Professor of Philosophy Alison Simmons, the co-chair of the Gen Ed task force, wrote in an e-mail last night. “Our proposal is subject based rather than discipline based.”

But at least one professor who spoke at yesterday’s meeting protested the task force’s decision to create a new system mirroring the Core’s structure.

“One of the problems with the Core, and maybe one of the only ones, is that there are too many categories,” Susan R. Suleiman, the Dillon professor of the civilization of France, said at the meeting. “The fewer categories, and the more vague, the better.”

—Lois E. Beckett and Evan H. Jacobs contributed to the reporting of this story.

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