The Core Needs More Flexibility

Shopping for Core courses is getting more and more difficult this year, for an obvious reason--there just aren't that many Cores available. Last semester, the Courses of Instruction's anemic offerings produced lotteries and bloated classes; this semester promises to be as bad or worse.

In the fall, the Core offered three courses in Historical Study B. three in Moral Reasoning and only one in Literature and Arts C. Most other Core areas offered five or six courses. But in Moral Reasoning 22 ("Justice"), class size topped 800; in Literature and Arts C-14 ("Heroes"), over 400 students attended. These perennially large classes often seized the majority of students enrolling in Moral Reasoning and Literature and Arts C.

The Core is meant to make students familiar with a wide variety of fields, but forcing them into huge magnet courses defeats that purpose. Instead of having Literature and Arts C in the fall, why not list just "Nagy's Take on Ancient Greece" as a new Core area in the course catalog?

Some students need to take a given Core in a given semester because they are seniors or their concentrations have heavy requirements. More choice should be available in these extenuating situations. It's too hard to plan your Cores and concentration courses perfectly starting from day one of your first year.

According to the new Courses of Instruction Supplement, the problem exists again this semester. Moral Reasoning only offers two courses this spring--that's five for the whole year--while Science B offers only three.

In the coming semester, Foreign Cultures will offer only one course that uses the English language exclusively. Both of the other Foreign Cultures courses being taught in the spring require extensive knowledge of German for readings and lectures.

The one English language course," Chinese Family, Marriage, and Kinship: A Century of Change," is a perennially lotteried class. With so few Foreign Cultures choices, the course promises to be oversubscribed and lotteried once again as seniors and others not fluent in German struggle to fill their Core requirements.

The solution to these problems is clear. Disbanding specific core classes in favor of groupings for regular, departmental courses will enhance flexibility without compromising quality. If some Core courses can't survive in existing departments, they were probably too "gut"-like in the first place to have deserved a slot in Harvard's curriculum.

Students will be able to fill the Core areas with pertinent and rigorous courses from the departments. Almost any course taught by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences can be grouped into an existing Core area.

Why not do for the rest of the Core what has already been done for Science A and B? In those two areas, students may take certain departmental courses and receive Core credit. Many humanities courses even cover the same material as existing Cores. A system of distributional requirements could allow students to pursue diverse topics more rigorously. The Core can only gain from his liberalization.