Gen Ed Program Fits Core For First Years

The General Education committee has made it easier for incoming freshmen to graduate under the Core: all new Gen Ed classes will count for Core credit.

But for now, that guarantee does not mean much—only 9 truly new Gen Ed courses have been developed so far.

Over a year after Gen Ed was approved, 44 classes have been approved for the eight categories, all of which will be required of students in the new program. Since freshmen opting for Gen Ed would have to fulfill nine requirements including Expository Writing, the committee is recommending that freshmen choose the Core in light of sparse course offerings in Gen Ed so far.

When Gen Ed officially launches next fall, counting new Gen Ed classes for Core credit will be crucial to making sure that the Class of 2012 has enough flexibility as the last class to graduate under a soon-to-be-extinct curriculum.

“I don’t think it should be the case that incoming students who opt for the Core will find any dearth of courses,” said Jeffry A. Frieden, last year’s chair of the Core’s Subcommittee on Quantitative Reasoning.

Thomas F. Kelly, last year’s chair of the Core’s Subcommittee on Literature and Arts, expressed similar sentiments.

“[The Core committee] has been very lenient in the last couple of years anyway because of the effort that’s been made to ensure that the Core doesn’t kind of taper down to nothing,” Kelly said in a phone interview from Italy, where he now is on leave.

“You can imagine a professor wouldn’t be particularly interested in creating a new course when the Core is going to be phased out in a year or two,” Kelly, a music professor, added.

Harvard’s next crop of freshmen—the Class of 2013—will be required to graduate under Gen Ed, placing all the more pressure on professors to submit petitions for classes both old and new.

Now that the Core Standing Committee has been dissolved and approving Core classes will be the responsibility of the Gen Ed committee, Dean of Undergraduate Education Jay M. Harris, who also chairs the Gen Ed committee, has said that he is looking to make sure that more department classes are approved for Core credit.

Incoming freshmen officially are entering under the Core, but can switch to Gen Ed next year if they wish.

In the meantime, the options in some Core categories are not promising. Only three classes counting toward the Literature and Arts C requirement will be taught this fall.

—Staff writer Bonnie J. Kavoussi can be reached at kavoussi@fas.harvard.edu.