Portals of Pedagogy

Students in search of a portal to the humanities will soon have many options, thanks to a variety of new interdisciplinary humanities courses announced last week. These courses––most of which will be offered in 2007-08, but some of which will debut this fall––will greatly enrich Harvard’s humanities offerings along the lines proposed by the Harvard College Curricular Review (HCCR), and will serve as needed pathways into the often overspecialized world of Harvard’s arts and literature courses.

Envisioned by Dean for the Humanities Maria Tatar as a “bridge between the Core” and the system of distributional requirements outlined by the HCCR, these courses will offer a broad introduction to a wide range of texts and ideas. They will provide students interested in the humanities with a solid starting point––much like Ec10 and Life Sciences 1a afford students of other disciplines––while also satisfying divisional requirements for students studying other fields. This flexibility must be commended.

Tatar anticipates that between 15 and 20 of these courses will be developed, enabling course sizes to be small and instruction personal. The individual attention and student-professor interaction such courses are likely to foster will be a welcome change from the overwhelming size of many foundational courses.

While many of these proposed courses are sure to be enticing––a class on odysseys to be co-taught by Bass Professor of English and American Literature and Language Louis Menand and Cogan University Professor of the Humanities Stephen J. Greenblatt is a promising example––we can only hope that a sufficient number of similarly exciting courses will be offered concurrently, so as to ensure that small class size remains a signature feature of these gateway courses. We also hope that soon-to-be-developed portal courses in other areas will emulate this system of small and varied courses.

While we are glad that faculty members and administrators have begun to implement the general education reforms of the HCCR ahead of schedule, we hope that these courses will be folded seamlessly into the Core Curriculum in the interim. We call upon the Core Curriculum Committee to fit these courses into the current Core by allowing students to use these courses to satisfy Core requirements broadly. This move will not only offer students greater flexibility, but it will also realize Tatar’s vision that these courses fluidly connect the current Core with future divisional requirements.