Core Options May Expand Next Fall

While the Faculty of Arts and Sciences will meet today to discuss major reforms to the College’s system of general education that could eventually lead to the elimination of the Core Curriculum, the committee that oversees the current system is working to expand the number of departmental courses that can be taken to fulfill Core requirements.

Dean of the Faculty William C. Kirby said last week that he wrote to departments and asked them to submit lists of courses they offer that could be used as Core bypasses in the fall.

The Core Standing Committee (CSC), which Kirby chairs, will meet next Tuesday to discuss and potentially approve these courses.

A major criticism of the current Core system, which has existed since the early 1980s, is that students are only offered a limited number of courses in each of the Core’s 11 areas. As a result, students cannot take more advanced departmental courses, even if they have the appropriate preparation—a criticism acknowledged by the Curricular Review’s Committee on General Education.

For example, students can take Quantitative Reasoning 20, “Computers and Computing,” to fulfill a Core requirement, but they cannot take the more advanced Computer Science 51, “Introduction to Computer Science II.”

Kirby said that the expansion of the number of Core bypasses “seems [to be] in some sense already mandated by faculty discussion and student opinion.”

While it is not yet clear which departmental courses will be approved as bypasses, it is likely that the number of newly approved courses in the humanities and social sciences will be largerhan in the sciences, because the science and math areas of the Core already have many bypasses.

Only five departmental courses can currently be taken to satisfy a Historical Study A or B requirement, while there are 28 departmental courses that can be used to fulfill a Science A or B requirement.

“We already accept pretty much every plausible departmental science course as an alternate to the Core courses,” wrote Clowes Professor of Science Robert P. Kirshner ’70, a CSC member, in an e-mail yesterday morning. “For the Science Core, there’s no ‘loosening’ of requirements or change in approach.”

But historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, the 300th anniversary University professor and another CSC member, wrote yesterday morning that students “will have lots of new possibilities” for fulfilling history Core requirements next year, as the number of departmental bypasses will be expanded to at least 15.

—Staff writer Evan H. Jacobs can be reached at ehjacobs@fas.harvard.edu.