Revamp Core Lotteries

It's that time of the semester again. Yes, we know it's not pleasant. But it seems that by some sort of natural necessity Mother Harvard is semi-annually made to spew forth students from a number of her Core courses based on nothing more than random selection. In order to limit class size, Harvard professors are often forced to select their pupils by lottery. The unfortunate victims of these lotteries emerge from the shopping period feeling rejected and unsatiated in their selection of courses.

Course lotteries are one more example of why the Core needs reforming. The distribution requirements currently being considered by the FAS Core Review Committee would go a long way to limit class size and prevent Core lotteries by allowing increased student choice. As the rules stand, however, there is an extraordinarily limited selection of courses to fill requirements in many of the Core areas. Four courses were, in fact, lotteried last week: Foreign Cultures 62: "Chinese Marriage, Family and Kinship;" Literature and Arts A-18: "Fairy Tales and the Culture of Childhood;" Literature and Arts B-51: "First Nights;" and Science B-29: "Human Behavioral Biology." Despite the gigantic size of these classes, more students want to take them than can possibly be accommodated--due to the constraints of the Core. The Core curriculum forces students to take classes in areas in whichthey are not necessarily comfortable, and that fact forces them to take classes perceived as being extraordinarily easy, of which there are extraordinarily few.

The solution to the course lotteries does not lie with the elimination of the lotteries themselves. We do not want to see thousands of students packed into the Science Center lecture halls glued to video screens. It is therefore necessary to increase the options students have in the courses they are able to take for Core credit. Imagine if any science or math course could be taken to fulfill the Core requirement. Class size would decrease; student utility would increase; and professors would be lecturing to students who actually want to listen to them.

Harvard should approach the problem of limited course choices by listening to its students. Our education is currently undermined by the lottery process, itself a necessary derivative of a limited Core program. Students seek increased choice and smaller courses, both of which would be feasible under a revised Core program based upon distribution requirements.