Crack Open the Core

With a new general education scheme in sight, but a lame duck Core Curriculum still looming over the College, Harvard students find themselves in a rather awkward position. We know the Core’s days are numbered, but the changes are happening too slowly—and too unpredictably—to realistically plan for life under general education. So, alas, we must resign ourselves to being the last generation of students to live by the rules of the Core—but we shouldn’t have to.

For many years now, students have been able to take cross-listed departmental courses to satisfy Core requirements. Cross-listing makes sense, as a broad array of departmental courses deal with the same skill sets and areas of knowledge as Core classes.

Literature and Arts A courses, for example, have no monopoly on questions like “What are the relations among author, reader, text, and the circumstances in which the text is produced?” to quote the Courses of Instruction. Yet the number of cross-listed departmental courses remains agonizingly low. We are stumped as to why English 151, “The 19th Century Novel,” is somehow worthy of Core credit, while English 141, “The 18th Century Novel,” is not.

Bizarrely, the Core continues to insist that its presentation of various “approaches to learning” justifies its distinctness from the rest of the curriculum. Perhaps students could be expected to put up with this absurd pretense while the Core was the only game in town. But now that all relevant parties have recognized the failures of the Core, and with a new system right around the corner, it’s time for the administration to open the floodgates.

Generally speaking, all potentially cross-listed departmental courses must first pass muster with the appropriate core subcommittee—say, the Science Subcommittee for a Science B course—which in turn decides whether or not to pass it on to the Core Standing Committee. Then, and only then, can a departmental course get an up or down vote on double-counting as a Core class. This administrative nightmare is compounded by the fact that the Core Standing Committee meets rarely and with little input from the student body.

The resulting dearth of cross-listed departmental courses makes the already limited Core offerings even more crowded and impersonal than they might otherwise be. Literature and Arts B-11, “The Art of Film,” for example, drew upwards of 700 students to its first meeting (and ended up having to cut 500). Many Core courses are so big that they render any meaningful discussion during lecture essentially impossible.

Thankfully, a back channel exists. During shopping period, Dean of the College Benedict H. Gross ’71 and Dean of the Faculty Jeremy R. Knowles managed to speed up the process, pushing through Humanities 10, 12, and 16 as Literature and Arts A substitutes, even though the Core Standing Committee and its subcommittees were not in session.

This move demonstrates that the administration can, in fact, do something about the Core right now, in the interim, as students remain stuck in a system that everyone knows is broken. We urge Deans Gross and Knowles to continue working around the unacceptably slow Core Committee, adding departmental courses to the Core as fast as possible for those students who won’t be able to reap the benefits of the new general education framework.

While focusing on the needs of future students, the College is letting current students languish. Deans Gross and Knowles must reaffirm their focus on the here and now, and do all in their power to make the academic experiences of Harvard’s current students as rewarding as possible.