More Cores, Please

As students wait for the Faculty of Arts and Sciences to slowly turn its wheels and approve new requirements for general education, the lame duck Core curriculum remains. After Tuesday’s meeting of the Faculty and Arts and Sciences, it is more than clear that the proposed requirements—a broad system of general distribution requirements, rather than the current Core—will not be in place for the next school year. In the interim, the Core Standing Committee (CSC), which is the group of faculty members that determines which courses garner the label “Core,” should expand the range of departmental courses that count for Core credit—and it appears as though it is poised to do so at its meeting tomorrow.

The Core curriculum should be replaced with a system of distribution requirements where students will be required to take a few courses in each academic “domain”—the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. The current Core is flawed primarily because it forces students to choose from an unnecessarily small number of courses within an academic domain, often forcing students into less rigorous courses in order to fulfill a given requirement. Under the current system, for example, Quantitative Reasoning 20: “Computers and Computing,” fulfills a Core requirement for Quantitative Reasoning, while the more advanced departmental course Computer Science 51: “Introduction to Computer Science II,” does not.

In the humanities and social sciences, in particular, there are very few departmental courses that count for Core credit. There are only four courses in the history department, for example, that fulfill either the Historical Studies A or Historical Studies B requirement. Worse, there are very few Core courses offered in a given Core area in any semester, severely limiting students’ course options.

Students will reasonably ask about retroactive Core credit for taking departmental courses that have since gained Core status. Core credit should, indeed, be retroactive, so long as there are no substantive changes to a course’s curriculum and requirements when it becomes a Core. But one of the requirements for a course to satisfy a Core requirement is that the course have midterm and final examinations. This allows students to be evaluated on the full scope of the course, rather than allowing them to complete a course’s requirements through a final paper that is narrow in scope, as is the case in many departmental courses. Core credit should only be awarded retroactively if the course previously had these mechanisms. When the CSC approves a new course (and perhaps mandates structural changes to the course), it should evaluate the course’s previous syllabi if retroactive credit should be awarded.

Students want more Core courses, and the curricular review has recommended a wider system of distribution requirements. But since the full Faculty has been slow—very slow—to discuss the general education recommendations, the CSC must take appropriate measures to better general education for Harvard undergraduates. The CSC can, and should, quickly do what the Faculty has not been able to: give us more choices in our distribution requirements.