Abolish the Core

Over the last four days, we have documented the Core Program's persistent flaws. Still, the goal of the Core--to provide students with a broad liberal arts education--is one that we support. A distribution requirement would better achieve these aims while avoiding the Core's inflexibility.

This proposal is governed by two basic principles. First, before graduating from the College, every student should be familiar with the methods of inquiry employed in the study of the social and natural sciences, literature, the arts, foreign cultures, philosophy, history and mathematics. Second, any graduation requirements intended to guide students toward this familiarity should give them the maximum degree of flexibility to shape their own academic careers.

These principles suggest that the concept of a Core--a graduation requirement which can be fulfilled only by selections from a separate list of classes--should be abandoned. Nearly any departmental course in the disciplines covered by the Core would give students the necessary familiarity with an "approach to knowledge." To include every appropriate course, the Core would have to expand until it was indistinguishable from a distribution requirement. And an expanded Core would still be subject to the often capricious decisions of the Standing Committee on the Core Program.

Instead, the Core model should be replaced with a department-centered distribution requirement, one that preserves the balance of the existing Core while removing the current system's arbitrary obstacles. A requirement in quantitative reasoning could be met by any course in the mathematics or statistics departments; a requirement in foreign cultures could be met by any upper-level language course. No student would feel compelled to take a course of lesser depth, breadth or rigor simply to meet a graduation requirement. Some cross-listings as well as an open, predictable petition process would still be required to account for the courses whose methods of inquiry differ from that generally practiced in their department--a political economy course in the Government department, for example.

These exceptions, however, would serve to assist rather than hinder students' growth. Similarly, those few existing Cores which could not, for whatever reason, be integrated into the departments would continue as General Education courses and would be cross-listed for distribution credit. Although some coordinating body would oversee the process, its main mission would be to lobby the departments on the students' behalf; it would not have the influence that the Core committee currently exercises over course decisions.

We firmly believe that every Harvard student should be exposed to many approaches to knowledge. Yet we deny that the large, watered-down lecture classes that constitute the bulk of the Core accomplish this task. The College can expand students' options without increasing requirements, allowing undergraduates to choose the liberal arts education that they deserve.