Before Core Classes, Students Took Gen Ed

Before there was the core curriculum, Harvard forced its undergraduates to take "General Education" requirements.

By the late 1970s when the core was voted in, professors say, the Gen Ed program had become a "watered down" graveyard of useless courses.

But it started out with a very different vision.

The General Education program was established, at first experimentally, in 1946. The program was based on a book entitled General Education in a Free Society, which called for education to provide a "common and binding understanding of the society which [all citizens] will possess in common."

The book recommended that Harvard require every student to take the same introductory humanities course ("Great Texts in Literature"), the same introductory social science course ("Western Thought and Institutions"), and one of two lower-level courses in science.

The courses were interdisciplinary, with a focus on "the big picture" of Western society through a study of the classics.

But the plan was never fully realized. As support for General Education withered, the founding goals were forgotten. In the 1960s, a faculty committee charged with the task of reexamining Gen Ed recommended that the base of courses be expanded.

Rather than providing a common experience as was originally envisioned, Gen Ed became a distribution requirement drawn from a list of non-departmental offerings. These classes often focused on obscure topics like "The Scandinavian Cinema" and "The Films of John Ford."

By the 1970s, Gen Ed was dead, a program which had lingered based on a forgotten philosophy.

"It was possible for an undergraduate to make his way toward a bachelor's degree without ever taking rigorous work in science and other fields," says Harvard-Yenching Professor of History Albert M. Craig.

Then Professor of Economics Henry Rosovsky approached newly-appointed Harvard President Derek C. Bok in 1971 about reforming the undergraduate curriculum.

Two years later, Bok appointed Rosovsky Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and the process of curricular reform began.

Rosovsky kicked off with a letter to the Faculty in 1974. The task force on the core curriculum finished its final report in January 1977, recommending a program fairly close to the one adopted two years later. When the report came out, Rosovsky began the difficult job of rallying the faculty votes to pass it.

Many faculty were concerned about accepting the program as recommended; some worried that a general education, the value of which the task force reaffirmed, did not mean a series of courses in varied, specific topics.

In May 1977, after revisions to the original plan, the faculty finally endorsed the idea of a core requirement.

Many faculty members were against the core to the bitter end.

The core would be "a simple relabeling of what we are already doing badly--namely, generating non-departmental courses lacking the rigor of departmental offerings," said Arnold Professor of Science William H. Bossert '59 at the time.

But despite such objections, the faculty voted 182 to 65 in April 1978 to create the present core curriculum.

The next step was to create the actual core classes. Many General Education courses were simply transferred with a few changes into the new curriculum. Literature and Arts C-14, for instance, originally a house seminar, was in Gen Ed before becoming a core.