The Core Curriculum

To the Editors of The Crimson:

I'd like to thank Gary Rowe for raising some important considerations about the Core Curriculum in The Crimson (December 13, "A Core Problem"). At the same time, members of the Harvard community should recognize that the various failings of the Core Curriculum are considerably more complicated than Mr. Rowe suggests.

To focus attention on the graduate student teaching fellows who teach sections in the Core, as a rule, is surely to identify a potential weak link in the translation of the Core's high ideals into daily pedagogical practice. But to suggest greater care in hiring and training TFs actually skirts as many issues as it raises.

For example, graduate students as a rule receive limited financial support from Harvard in terms of outright grants during their years of teaching eligibility. As a result, graduate students tend to depend on their teaching income as more than financial assistance--it is in fact their principal means of financial support. Hence the "desperate scramble" for sections about which Mr. Rowe spoke.

Another shortcoming is also institutional. An unusually large share of the responsibility for teaching undergraduates here falls to graduate students who are themselves only in the process of acquiring their academic credentials and professional training, and at least part of this situation is attributable to faculty abdication of fuller teaching responsibility. Faculty guidance for TFs in the Core is common enough, but it is certainly not the rule.

One important failing, as Mr. Rowe mentions, is the problem of training. In the History Department, for example, there is no formal training of TFs in even the rudiments of teaching, let alone teaching in the Core. We are encouraged to attend an annual workshop, and periodically we receive pertinent mailings (the new Teaching Fellows Handbook was mailed at mid-semester), and the situation in this department is common to many. Most TFs tend to compensate by devoting unusual amounts of time to preparation, usually at the expense of the research for which we have come.

Another important failing which must be acknowledged is student attitudes. Many students consider the Core a list of requirements which must be satisfied, as simply as that. Still others consider the whole program a joke. One student I know heard about a Core course offered this spring and said, "It sounds good, but I've already taken my History." And another student who was in a Core section I taught was allowed to pass his final exam--at the professor's insistence--having written a D answer to one question and having left the other two required questions blank. In neither case are the ideals of the Core advanced, let alone those of education.

At the same time, most of us will have to acknowledge that the Core probably succeeds as often as it fails, and that experience will vary with individual students, teaching fellows, and professors. Any failures will be similarly complex, but it is fairly easy to see the roots of these in intertwined institutional shortcomings rather than merely personal ones. Paul Bohlmann   Teaching Fellow in History