Why We Learn What We Learn

In the 367-year evolution of Harvard University, the College’s curriculum has been reconsidered, reformed and redefined in response to the political, social and economic fluctuations of the surrounding world.

From the smaller questions of pedagogy and specialization to the larger concerns of the College’s place in the global community, Harvard’s curricular reforms have been both broad and narrow in scope, gradual and sudden, momentous and inconsequential.

And on the cusp of yet another curricular review, 25 years after the creation of the Core Curriculum, Harvard College looks over its shoulder at what has been, and forward to what might be.

Today, a “curricular review” is a more formal process. It entails an actual decision on the part of administrators to rexamine the structure and theory of Harvard’s undergraduate education, followed by the formation of committees to conduct extensive research, discussion and debate and to ultimately guide a set of recommendations through the politics of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences to adoption.

But in the beginning, curricular change was a slow, gradual process, often the accidental result of a changing student body and environment.

The first education offered to Harvard College students was a three-year trifurcated curriculum: the four students that entered Harvard in 1640 studied the “Liberal Arts,” the “Three Philosophies” and the “Learned Tongues” before earning their bachelor’s degrees.

The mission of the College was seen largely as educating future leaders of the local religious community.

During this period, Harvard had no endowment, students earned their entry by reciting Latin and paid their tuition by bartering goods; and recitation was the preferred teaching method.

Harvard changed little through the 17th century. The study of literature was added. There was an emphasis on logic, rhetoric, Greek, Hebrew, ethics and metaphysics and little focus on mathematics and the natural sciences.

In the 18th century, as New England flourished and the colonies moved towards independence, Harvard’s curriculum was still heavily rooted in religion but began to grow towards a “gentleman’s education,” a general curriculum augmented by private tutors in French and philosophy.

The Revolutionary War, for example, brought Harvard away from practical studies and towards loftier inquiries into ethics and virtues.

But as Harvard became more established as a leader in higher education, it became obvious that substantial changes would not come about naturally, but would have to be actively sought.University President Charles W. Eliot, Class of 1853, was the first president to turn Harvard College into something resembling what it is today: his 1870 reforms established an elective system characterized by flexibility and an expansion in course offerings. Instructors were given a greater degree of autonomy in grading practices and pedagogy.

Harvard’s curriculum operated under the Eliot system for the next 40 years, but its lack of structure eventually led to disorder.

Seeing this, in 1914, University President A. Lawrence Lowell introduced a policy of “Concentration and Distribution,” a system that reflected an ideology that the University’s mission was to create well-rounded students—an education at the intersection of various disciplines.

Lowell’s reforms, which were the predecessors of the distribution requirements and the Core curriculum that would follow later in the century under University Presidents James B. Conant ’14 and Derek C. Bok, required Harvard students to focus a minimum of six of their required 18 courses on one division (their concentration) while also taking at least six courses outside this primary field.

But it was not until Conant became president that the College’s mission became social as well as academic.

At that time, Harvard students were no longer the prep-school gentlemen of Harvard’s earlier days. Raised during the Great Depression, many students came to Harvard after serving in the military and many came from middle-class homes, or were the children of blue-collar workers.

A Harvard education, Conant decided, could no longer be exclusively humanistic. Conant had a vision of a meritocratic university that would reflect the liberalization of American society and prepare its students to serve and understand that society. With this in mind, Conant set up a committee under then-University Provost Paul H. Buck to design a new curriculum.

Buck’s committee gathered information and advice and even performed a comprehensive survey of Radcliffe students and alumnae, taking into careful consideration the social changes brought about by the two world wars.

In 1945 that committee drafted General Education in a Free Society—commonly known as “the Redbook”—which suggested a curriculum of diverse courses in the humanities, social sciences and sciences. There were courses on the “Great Texts of Literature” as well as “History of Science.” Like Lowell’s system, students had to take six of their 16 undergraduate courses under the umbrella of general education, distributing these courses among the three divisions.

The plan for General Education, approved overwhelmingly by the Faculty—after seven debates—was implemented in the fall of 1946.

Like Lowell’s reforms 30 years earlier, the Redbook—which quickly became a bestseller—had a ripple effect on the nation’s universities, leading to widespread acceptance of the notion that the academic institution could be a vehicle for social egalitarianism.

The new program had several major effects, including a dramatic expansion in the number of classes offered to undergraduates. By 1947, departments offered two to three times as many courses as they had at the turn of the century.

The Gen Ed system also led to the slow decline of the tutorial system, as some concentrations decided to stop offering their small advanced courses for upperclassmen.

The next three decades brought great social change to the nation, and to Harvard—the constituency of the undergraduate population changed again as the College opened its doors to more minorities, women and children of the working class.

And as America erupted into the social chaos of the 1960s, the General Education program that had been a great breakthrough upon its introduction in 1946 proved insufficient, unable to cope with the changing demands of Harvard’s students.

General Education had become a broad, nebulous category of courses that could not be classified into departments: requirements were vague, students were unmotivated and professors were frustrated.

The social changes of the preceeding decades had rendered the curriculum tiresome and disfunctional.

The impetus for reform came from then-Dean of the Faculty Henry A. Rosovsky.

In 1973, he organized a committee of six faculty members and two students, headed by government professor James Q. Wilson, that deliberated, researched and fielded advice from professors for several years.

This time, the goal of the curricular review was “the cultivation of diverse approaches to knowledge.”

The result was the Core Curriculum, which was adopted in 1978.

“The Core” was made up of 10 broad areas: two in Historical Studies, two in Literature, two Science, Music and Art, Social Analysis, and Moral Reasoning—the Quantitative Reasoning requirement was not added until a 1997 review of the Core.

Students were required to take courses in the eight Core areas furthest from their concentration.

This represented a more holistic way of considering higher education, a question not only of social justice or quantifiable academic progress, but one of “approaches,” giving students a breadth of approaches and techniques that would serve them in the rapidly modernizing, multicultural world.

Though it has been tweaked several times in the past 25 years, the Core curriculum is the system Harvard College uses today.

Reviews of the Core in the 1990s revealed general satisfaction with the system: 90 percent of Core courses were taught by senior faculty, students were happy with their concentration courses and even intrigued by their Core requirements.

But the past 25 years have brought more change to the College, the nation and the world.

In an age of globalization, where rapid developments in science, technology and scholarship have changed the fabric of the University, many believe that it is time for Harvard to review its curriculum once again.

Next fall, four committees—assembled at the behest of Dean of the Faculty William C. Kirby and Dean of Undergraduate Education Benedict H. Gross ’71—will examine every aspect of the undergraduate experience at Harvard.

By year’s end they hope to have recommendations for a new curriculum, one that will yet again seek to ensure Harvard graduates are well equipped for life and leadership in the 21st century.

—Information from the following books were used in the reporting of this article:

Samuel Eliot Morison, Three Centuries of Harvard, 1936.

Morton and Phyllis Keller, Making Harvard Modern, 2001.

Richard Norton Smith, The Harvard Century, 1986.

—Staff writer Rebecca D. O’Brien can be reached at robrien@fas.harvard.edu.