History Department Approves New Requirements

This year’s freshmen who concentrate in history will no longer have to take History 10a and 10b, two survey courses in Western civilization, as part of a new system of requirements approved by the History department last week, chair of the department Andrew D. Gordon ’74 said.

The new system is designed to give students more flexibility in course selection and increase their contact with faculty.

Starting in the fall of 2007, two history tutorials now partly taught by graduate students will be replaced by reading and research seminars led by professors, Gordon said.

If the Educational Policy Committee authorizes these changes, history will be the first department to adjust its requirements so that students will be able to delay their concentration choice until the middle of sophomore year—even though the full Faculty has yet to approve this curricular review proposal.

The Faculty of Arts and Sciences is expected to vote on concentration delay legislation at its next meeting on April 18.

But the department will move forward with the changes regardless of the outcome of the vote, Gordon said.

And following last week’s faculty vote to approve secondary fields, the department will discuss and possibly vote on a proposal for a secondary field in history tomorrow, Gordon added.

Current history concentrators will still be required to take History 10a, “Western Societies, Politics, and Cultures: From Antiquity to 1650,” and History 10b, “Western Economies, Societies, and Polities: From 1648 to the Present.”

The class of 2009, on the other hand, will fulfill a distributional requirement by taking at least one course each in pre-modern history, western history, and non-western history, according to a copy of the official proposal for the new requirements.

“Of those [professors] who teach pre-modern western history, the majority favored the shift,” Gordon said. “They’d rather not teach to captive audiences.”

Gordon said he thinks many students will still choose to take 10a and 10b, especially because the course is often taken as a Core course or an elective.

“I don’t think it’s going to have a big impact on enrollment,” he said.

In their junior year, this year’s freshmen who choose history as their concentration will take research seminars that offer more faculty involvement and more freedom in choosing their research topics, Gordon said.

But they also will be the last class to complete the current system of sophomore tutorials.

Beginning with the class of 2010, concentrators will only take one introductory tutorial, History 97, in the spring of their sophomore year.

In place of the old sophomore and junior tutorials, they will take one reading and one research seminar, which will be capped at 12 or 15 students and taught by professors.

These seminars, many of which will be adapted from current conference courses offered by the history department, will allow students to complete a research paper using a broad range of sources drawn from an area that interests them, Gordon said.

The current research tutorial forces students to base their research on specific primary sources, such as past issues of The New York Times, or materials drawn from the Harvard archives, said Joyce B. Main, undergraduate coordinator in the history department.

Current history concentrators said they welcomed the changes.

“Everything that they’re doing seems to be an response to issues we brought up,” said Rowan W. Dorin ’07, a member of the History Concentrators Committee, a group of undergraduates with whom the department consults.

Members of the department discussed the proposed changes with the committee before they voted on them last Thursday, Dorin said.

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