Generalized Education

It has been a long, hard struggle, choked full of casualties. The curricular review, in progress since 2002, has devoured with alarming ferocity the various faculty members who have attempted to find a replacement for the outmoded Core Curriculum. It has also managed to outlast both the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) Dean and the University president who were its initiators. Talk about staying power.

But sure as recalcitrant professors might try to stop the tide from turning, they were treated to the most palatable new vision for undergraduate education to date at last week’s Faculty meeting. Deliberately and thoroughly crafted over the last six months by an elite and semi-secret so-called Task Force on General Education, the proposed new requirements will surely revolutionize the way that oversubscribed, underwhelming Core courses are labelled and described in the course catalogue. I don’t know about you, but I’m excited.

The philosophy behind the Core’s heir presumptive is a staggering departure from the Core’s ethos. It does not attempt to create intellectual breadth by introducing students to major disciplinary “modes of inquiry,” as the Core supposedly does now. Rather, the new general education curriculum strives “to connect in an explicit way what students learn at Harvard to life beyond Harvard,” focusing on buckets of subject matter rather than on disciplinary approaches to academic problems. In other words, instead of imparting knowledge to make students better educated in the broadest sense, general education will impart knowledge to make students better educated in the broadest sense. And to make them better able to apply their single dose of “Empirical Reasoning” to a diurnal close reading of “Nightline.”

The change in the curriculum’s rationale is vital. Under the old Core system, it was never quite clear what precisely was involved in introducing students to “modes of inquiry.” More often than not, Core courses are watered-down introductions to the hyper-esoteric, poorly designed examinations of how disciplines engage with academic problems. This present perversion of the Core’s philosophy has led to courses whose names would suggest an enrollment of just a few sub-sub-specialists attracting hundreds of undergraduates whizzing along this college’s path of least resistance.

For instance, it’s probably safe to assume that the 353 people taking Literature and Arts B-20, “Designing the American City” this semester are less attracted to its riveting subject matter than they are to its impossibly low CUE Guide rating for workload. (At 1.8, it more than exceeds the threshold for “painless Core” status.)

The proposed new curriculum is refreshingly different. In a heartening effort at clarity, it abandons disciplines altogether, relying instead on zesty categories of subject matter to guide instruction. Faculty who have difficulty mounting courses in “Literature and Arts” without straying into the hinterlands of relevance will surely fare better when faced with its replacements, “Culture and Belief,” and the deliciously opaque “Aesthetic and Interpretive Understanding.”

It’s certainly fitting that the proposed new curriculum describes its categories in terms of the meaningless jibber-jabber that can easily turn a section into purgatory. “Aesthetic and Interpretive Understanding” sounds like the kind of filler one uses to impress a typically disinterested teaching fellow (TF) when one hasn’t done any of the assigned reading. Courses in this category will leave students able to analyze “primary texts and/or works of art…in the context of a theoretical framework.” This is, of course, highly distinct from courses to be offered in the “Culture and Belief” category, which will impart an ability to analyze “primary texts and/or works of art…in light of their historical, social, economic and/or cross-cultural conditions of production and reception.” Detractors may claim that the distinction will be easily—and consistently—blurred. Such nay-sayers should bear in mind however, that this is not the Core we’re talking about; muddling of the sort that has marred the old curriculum quite simply won’t happen in the new. Trust us.

Asking students to work across disciplines might be fairly straightforward; our malleable intellects lend themselves to mixing academic media, sometimes even by design. But demanding the same flexibility from a graduate student TF writing a dissertation on, say, designing the American city or something, is an entirely different matter. Academics are trained in specific disciplines defined by their methodologies, not in the content-oriented subject headings of the proposed new curriculum. The experience of the Core demonstrated that to expect professors to teach “modes of inquiry” was to expect too much. Expecting the new curriculum to keep its cross-disciplinary shape under the stewardship of committed disciplinarian is no less ambitious.

The old Core has disintegrated into mush because the faculty and graduate students who offer its constituent courses have lacked the discipline to keep within the confines of its guiding philosophy. The new Core offered by the Task Force, by virtue of its opacity and over-ambitious crossing of disciplinary lines, is on the same all-too-familiar trajectory. Prospective students be warned; it’s only a matter of time before you, too, will be shopping Aesthetic and Interpretive Understanding 20, “Designing the American City.”

Adam Goldenberg ’08 is a social studies concentrator in Winthrop House. His column appears on alternate Tuesdays.