Working Out the Core

Ask a freshman to point out a good Lit B course, and he or she will probably look as if you asked them to identify a gramophone. The Core Program will reach extinction after the class of 2012 graduates, and with it will go any recollection of the 11 categories over which many juniors and seniors still agonize. Ninety percent of seniors and 50 percent of juniors are still on the Core program. Three hundred of these students petitioned for departmental courses to count for Core credit this year, and, as the number of courses primarily intended for the Core dwindles, the College should exercise lenience in evaluating petitions for departmental courses to count for the Core.

As the student body switches from the Core’s mentality of intending “to introduce students to the major approaches to knowledge,” to the Gen Ed one of connecting course material to “life outside the ivied walls,” the learning process has grown more confusing for students on the Core. For example, while only three courses still include “Literature and Arts A” in their title, 19 General Education courses—categorized as Aesthetic and Interpretive Understanding, Culture and Belief, or Foreign Culture—also count for this Core. From our experience, it is now possible to fulfill this requirement and graduate from Harvard without having closely read a text or without having written a substantive essay of literary analysis, as one would be required to do in the one remaining pure Literature and Arts A “The Book of Job and the Joban Tradition.” Now, however, students can engage in more creative projects that, while valuable, neglect the sorts of skills Harvard’s curriculum used to inculcate.

There are students who are dedicated to the Core philosophy and are satisfied and happy adding to their “ways of knowing.” For these undergraduates, being stuck in the middle of a methodological shift is frustrating. Since the Faculty approved the Core in 1978 until it approved Gen Ed in 2007, the College purported that understanding the methods of different disciplines was the best way to educate students in a general manner.

Although there are certainly students still in the Core who simply want to finish their general requirements, and do not care through which pedagogical lens they do this, the fact that some juniors and seniors are still convinced of the Core’s merits should not be surprising. The College should plan accordingly.

Also, human resources for Core students have also significantly diminished. In June 2009, the director of the Core Program retired, and, in May 2010, the assistant director of the program left.

Although the shift from Core to Gen Ed took years for the faculty to deliberate—an initial brainstorming booklet entitled “Essays on General Education in Harvard College” was published in 2004—for the class of 2011 and 2012, it happened suddenly. In order to make up for this confusing bureaucratic change, the College should be lenient in evaluating Core petitions.