The Closing of the Harvard Mind

When the Core curriculum was instituted in 1979, it was hailed as a revolution in higher education, making the front page of The New York Times. But over the last two decades, the Core has gone from a visionary proposal to a stifling and stagnant attempt to provide Harvard undergraduates with a liberal arts education.

It is now time to let the Core curriculum evolve into what it should have originally been--an education system that exposes students to various approaches to learning. The most effective way to achieve these ends is not with a watered-down constricting Core program, but rather with a new, comprehensive distribution requirement.

Harvard University stands poised to revolutionize its undergraduate curriculum. President Neil L. Rudenstine will leave his post this June, and we hope that the new president will recognize the gross inadequacies of the current undergraduate requirements and swiftly address them.

The Core Program was founded as a way to expose undergraduates not merely to a wide body of knowledge drawn from various disciplines but to different methods of inquiry. This approach stemmed from the long-held belief that Harvard students should graduate as broadly-educated individuals with specialized knowledge in one specific area.

This philosophy was--and is--a sound one. And we have repeatedly called for various reforms that would help the Core fulfill its original objectives. More Core classes, both to ease overcrowding in the popular favorites and to increase student choice, might have alleviated some of our concerns. Although the Faculty have occasionally recognized similar problems, no substantive improvements have been made. Overcrowded classes, poor course selection and the stonewalled petitions have continued to plague undergraduates.

But these superficial flaws mask the real problem--the Core program itself. Not only does the current Core program fail to provide undergraduates with a true liberal arts education, but it also encourages the perception that students are ill-equipped to take departmental classes in fields other than their own. In fact, students rightly balk at taking watered-down Core classes when they could tackle the subject more intensively in a more substantive departmental course. Unfortunately, undergraduates are discouraged from enrolling in such non-concentration courses because they must still fulfill the Core requirements to graduate.

Efforts to reform the Core began in 1997 with the Core Review Committee. But its recommendations--to add more Core courses in every area, to add the Quantitative Reasoning requirement and to cap enrollment in certain courses--did not go far enough. The addition of new Core courses has been minimal and capped enrollment in some courses has only resulted in students being lotteried out of their preferred option in a certain Core area.

The 10 areas of the Core are certainly not the only paths to obtaining a broad-based liberal arts education. There is no need to offer a separate group of classes to teach methods of inquiry--students learn these methods by taking courses in fields other than their own. Mathematical reasoning is taught in all mathematics classes, and appreciation for music can be learned through departmental music courses as well as Literature and Arts B. Students should be encouraged to take challenging courses, not driven away from them by Core-heavy graduation requirements. As the undergraduate curriculum stands today, Core courses possess no unique access to "methods of learning"; the Core has thus become an unwieldy distribution requirement in fact, if not in name.

Students would be better served by a broader, simpler distribution requirement. This alternative should preserve the Core's emphasis on the social and natural sciences, literature, arts, history and mathematics. The few Core courses that do not find a place within a department should be offered as general education courses. Over the next week we will further investigate the problems with the Core and elucidate our suggestions for a future undergraduate curriculum.

There could not be a better time to reevaluate the Core curriculum and its place within undergraduate education. Over the past six years, many prestigious universities-- including Princeton, Stanford and Duke--have overhauled their own graduation requirements. The arrival of the next president will offer us a rare opportunity to focus on undergraduate education with new vigor and fresh insight. Harvard led the way in 1979--it cannot afford to rest on its laurels any longer.