Curriculum Manual Debuts

Every year at registration, College first-years are inundated with packs of booklets, leaflets, and guides to classes, campus organizations and pizza deliverers, to name only a few.

This year, at their doorsteps, they will also receive a "do-it-yourself-kit" on how to choose their first classes at Harvard.

The booklet, called "What is a College Education? (and How to Get One)," was written by Dartmouth Professor of English Literature Jeffrey Hart and has been distributed to 20,000 incoming first-years at 12 colleges around the country.

It is funded by grants from the "Ad Hoc Committee on the Curriculum"--a group of 50 university professors from around the country who discuss educational issues, according to Hart.

But the manual, which emphasizes the importance of a strong foundation in Western culture and civilization for a liberal arts education, may not be what all Harvard first-years are looking for as a guide to their College educational experiences.

Hart, who is a senior editor of the conservative National Review, and a frequent columnist for the Dartmouth Review, writes that too many students finish college with no knowledge of the most important literatures of the Western world--"major works they ought to read in order to venture forth on the life of the mind."

"Students come to college ignorant, and they leave it ignorant," he writes.

In the booklet Hart urges students to take courses which teach authors of the ancient Greek and Roman world, such as Homer, Plato and Aristotle, and of European Renaissance and modern eras, such as Dante, Shakespeare, and Gothe.

"These are books that the educated person needs to read because there is a long-standing consensus in their favor," Hart writes.

Students in American universities should study Western literature in order to learn their origins and present place in history, Hart said yesterday.

"American law and language comes from Europe...not much is derived from Confucius," Hart said.

Hart even includes a list of an exemplary first-year syllabus and his personal "Five Best" author list.

And although Hart, in the booklet, writes that Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man cannot be excluded from any 20th century American literature class, he adds later that it would not be enough to graduate from college having read Toni Morrison, Kurt Vonnegut and Ann Beattie.

Hart said he hopes to sell the pamphlet at campus bookstores beginning next year for about two dollars, the cost of production.