Let’s Get on With It

Knowledge sort of accumulates,” noted former University President A. Lawrence Lowell, Class of 1877. “The freshmen bring a little in and the seniors don’t take much away.” If universities, as Lowell seemed to suggest, are reservoirs of knowledge, then Harvard would be a particularly heavy one, slow to move. The Harvard College Curricular Review is a case in point. It was launched in the fall of 2002, and while the all the review’s committee’s had released their reports by this January, most of their recommendations remain unimplemented.

Most of the reforms have been precise, sure-footed, and wide-ranging, and we look forward to their immediate implementation. Yet the future of the curricular review has unnecessarily come into doubt in recent months with two resignations—those of Dean of the Faculty William C. Kirby and of University President Lawrence H. Summers. We reiterate Kirby’s warning in his annual Letter to the Faculty this year, that “Harvard is otherwise at risk of becoming a great university with merely sub-par undergraduate teaching.” This, then, is the function and gravity of the curricular review. In short, it’s time to get moving.

The review is the work of eight different committees, the most wide-reaching and controversial of which was the Committee on General Education. The Gen Ed report has generally been received favorably because there is rightfully a general consensus, among undergraduates and many faculty members alike, that the Core is antiquated and broken. It seeks to teach “approaches to knowledge” without any reference to the knowledge being approached. The result is students who may excel in cocktail party details but are not necessarily broadly educated.

The first and key proposal involves replacing the current Core Curriculum with distributional requirements. These requirements would consist of three courses each in three subject areas—Arts and Humanities, the Study of Societies, and Science and Technology. Distributional requirements have the benefit of expanding the range of courses with which students may fulfill their requirements. With it, students could pursue courses appropriate to their stage of study instead of being limited to arbitrarily privileged Core courses.

In place of Core courses, the committee recommended that the Faculty craft 15 to 20 interdisciplinary foundational courses in general education. These classes would not be compulsory, but would be available to students interested in a solid introduction to their disciplines as well as satisfying divisional requirements. One enticing example is a course 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. We look forward to portal courses such as these and, more broadly, the reforms proposed by the Committee of General Education.

Some of the reforms suggested by the curricular review’s other committees involve revamping the Expository Writing program to have professors and not preceptors teach it, to include more public speaking, and to cap the number of students in each Expos course at 12. The Committee on Pedagogical Improvement made recommendations to, not surprisingly, improve pedagogy, emphasizing the role of course evaluations. The Committee on Advising and Counseling also recommended appointing a dean to oversee a new Office of Advising (which the College has been quick to do—naming Monique Rinere to the post last December) and the transformation of the Prefect program into a peer advising program for upperclassmen to advise freshmen. Other committees’ recommendations included expanding financial aid for summer study abroad programs and creating more integrative, introductory science courses in the life and physical sciences. We wholeheartedly endorsed these reforms and await their immediate implementation.

The proposals of the Education Policy Committee and the Committee on a January Term, on the other hand, we view with some skepticism. Instead of rewarding students for the breadth of their interests, the creation of secondary fields is more likely to compel students down the path of credentialism. The second key reform of the Education Policy Committee was to delay concentration choice until the end of the first semester of sophomore year. But this would be inherently disadvantageous to concentrations in the sciences, especially engineering—and would not have served their ostensible purpose—to allow students to make more informed decisions. (These two reforms, alas, are the only two that the Faculty of Arts and Sciences has approved.) The January Term reforms sought to create a period between the first and the second semester that would allow for students to pursue enrichment away from their term-time courses. But given the amount of opportunities during the term and the summer, a January term is simply unnecessary.

These, then, are our praises and quibbles with the results of the curricular review. Yet further discussion matters little unless the Faculty is willing to push forward implementation with its votes. As it stands, the review has stalled ostensibly due to the absence of a permanent dean or president (and, for several months, the Faculty’s obsession with ousting Summers). But the notion that the departure of two men could leave the process so crippled has little basis in reality. Indeed, if there is anything newly appointed University President Derek C. Bok and Dean of the Faculty Jeremy R. Knowles could shepherd without controversy, it is the curricular review that has been three-plus years in the making and has yielded generally reasonable, if not laudable, proposals. If members of the College community can come together and focus their efforts on the curricular review, as Kirby has suggested, it will need no figurehead. The future of the College lies in the execution of this agenda, and that execution must begin now.