Bok and the Core

The following is excerpted from the Crimson's recent interview with President Bok. See section four for entire interview.

Q: Turning to another area, do you think that the Core is Harvard-specific?

A: Well, one thing I do want to be very clear about is that the development of our Core Curriculum was purely and simply an effort to improve the education of students at Harvard College. There was no intent of any kind to try to construct a model curriculum for anyone else and there was no intent of any kind to ever seek publicity for what we were doing. So that to some extent the impression may have been created because the newspapers picked it up that Harvard was purporting to provide the answer for everyone else--that is an artifact of the media and that has nothing to do with what we were trying to accomplish, nor did the interest in the media arise in any way from our efforts. So whether or not other colleges profit in any way or adapt their curriculum from ours is something that is hard for me to predict. My guess is that there will probably be some colleges perhaps that would find their situations sufficiently like ours and order their educational priorities sufficiently like ours that would lead them to change their curriculums in some way that corresponds more or less to the Core Curriculum. But one of the great advantages of our system of higher education is its diversity. There are many different kinds of colleges and universities and many different kinds of schools, large, small, unisex, coeducational, religious-affiliated, non-religious affiliated. It would be a great shame if any one conception of undergraduate education, or any one curriculum, became dominant--we would lose one of the advantages that we have. So whereas there may be some impact on some institutions, I would very much doubt that there would be a sweeping impact and indeed it would be, I think, unwise and harmful for undergraduate education, given the diversity of needs, interests and aspirations and abilities of the total student body that are being served, if any one system did become dominant.

Q: How, in your opinion, does the Core differ from the General Education program?

A: Well, it differs in several ways. First of all, it does add certain things which either seem to perhaps be neglected in the General Education field, such as the specific emphasis on ethical choice as one category, or added some things that seem to reflect new educational needs that are more apparent now than at the time the General Education program was adopted. And two, that I would mention there is the emphasis on quantitative skills, which even when Gen Ed was adopted, which is about the time I went to college, was perceived as something that scientists and engineers and maybe doctors might need but not the majority, and since then there's been a pervasive impact of quantitative forms of reasoning. So the second one is the emphasis on foreign cultures, which again I think reflects the fact that as late as World War II, when the Gen Ed program was introduced, we saw ourselves only temporarily involved in an international conflict, and it wasn't until later that we saw that we were going to be increasingly and permanently involved in a more and more interdependent series of countries that made an emphasis in the Core Curriculum along these lines more necessary.

Q: The media--and I'm excluding The Crimson--has trumpeted the Core as a back to-basics program. Would you say it is?

A: Well back-to-basics is such an elusive and ambiguous term that I certainly wouldn't want to say that's all it is. I think to most people, back-to-basics connotes a kind of remedial education, or a kind of drill on the fundamentals. I don't think that's a very good description of what the Core is trying to do. What the Core is attempting to do is to define the most important elements of the liberal education, the most important intellectual skills and the most important ways and methods of apprehending the important areas of human experience, and make sure that everything in the Core is specifically designed to address one of those important goals, one important method of thought, one important intellectual skill. So that in that sense there's a greater emphasis on what we feel are the fundamentals of the foundation for further liberal arts learning, but I think that means something quite different than most people's conception of back-to-basics.