The Hollowed Core

For some 300 years of its existence, Harvard has been a school enamored with the virtues of liberal education. The term’s meaning has remained roughly the same, now embodied in today’s Core. To be, as Larry Summers puts it, a member of the “educated company of man,” one must have an empathy and understanding for a variety of subjects. And in earlier days, this also meant a fundamental set of knowledge: all Harvard students read Aristotle, Plato and Kant.

About 30 years ago, this system, still practiced in Columbia’s “Great Books” structure, was tossed out, giving rise to the Core, which was supposed to teach students methods to “approach knowledge.” Yet, in its current implementation, most Historical Studies courses do not teach “approaches” to history; they teach history itself. Most syllabi to be found in the Core will be more or less blunt about the fact that little separates the course from a real history course, except, of course, for the fact that it arbitrarily counts to fulfill a Core requirement.

Harvard College Professor Jorge I. Dominguez, a professor who teaches one such history class, asked openly in an open forum on the Core, “What does it mean to be an educated man or woman?” To follow through on Dominguez’s thought, it presumably does not mean to be selectively educated in “Health Economics” versus “Introduction to Investments.” Rather, it means receiving a well-rounded education that builds on what high school has provided students. And to this, it adds a first layer of specialization to give a sampling of what grad school will be, for the many Harvard students who go. But Harvard does not, simply put, require its graduates to know anything in common with each other. Even in the Core, course selection is entirely up to the students, and they have to pick only from a hodgepodge which teaches them less about “quantitative reasoning” and more about a specific area of study.

Worst of all, students have a remarkable tendency to betray the tradition of liberal education altogether. For those history concentrators with a focus in International History, “The Strategy of International Politics” is a likely way to fulfill a QR requirement, with the added encouragement of the course being “painless,” according to the CUE guide. By their sophomore years, if they’re smart, Harvard students are looking at the “workload” and “difficulty” ratings of any Core course, and saving their energies for concentration courses that ultimately count in their GPAs. Harvard actually facilitates this process, making sure that a broad range of courses span the curriculum, some of which seem particularly targeted to Government or Pre-Med and so on. So, in picking a Lit and Arts B course, a musically illiterate student like me might well select a course like Ingrid Monson’s Jazz course because it has less to do with music than others, and more to do with social justice and history, with which I have more experience and confidence.

When this kind of selection process is replicated for 4000 other students (it is safe to bet that a slim minority masochistically challenge themselves in their Core selections), something else happens: the Core becomes ludicrously easy. For most Harvard kids, their Core selections represent the path of least resistance. I have no inclination to take Math 1a, and certainly not Math 21a, because I can always take “The Magic of Numbers.” Likewise, someone uninterested in philosophy would not fulfill their Moral Reasoning requirement by taking Philosophy 168: “Kant’s Ethical Theory,” the only departmental course that fulfills the MR requirement. The real difference between departmental and Core courses is not that one teaches, say, a subject and one teaches an approach to a subject. No, both clearly teach a subject, as Phil 168’s duality and strict subject matter clearly indicate. The difference lies in that one, the Core and the courses that are taught exclusively within its confines, is simply dumbed-down so as not to trouble students who might have no interest in the subject.

So, while Harvard makes numerous pretenses to seek out those mystical “well-rounded” applicants from thousands of applicants every year, it makes only a bad faith attempt at keeping its students well-rounded. There is a strong case to be made for sticking with Harvard’s long history of liberal education. After all, grad school has historically been where true specialization takes place, and Harvard has never taken pride, as MIT has, in producing students who are essentially academic drones with blinders attached, divorced from all fields of study but their own. If the College is truly serious about the academic philosophy it advocates, an overwhelming change to the Core, the last vestige of a liberal education’s implementation, is needed.

After a painfully long time, the College is, indeed, reviewing a large part of undergraduate education. And any change is likely to be an improvement from the status quo, but in order to make an ideologically sound Core, the Curriculum Review Steering Committee must decide whether there should or should not be a broad, overarching set of knowledge that every Harvard graduate should know by commencement. And, additionally, the College must decide how serious their commitment is to liberal education—serious enough to incorporate Core grades into a student’s concentration GPA? Serious enough to be far more selective in its Core classes? A middle ground, which sacrifices this seriousness for laxity, as the current Core does, is merely an option at war with itself, a system which makes overtures at a well-rounded, liberal education but compels students to take the easy way out.

Travis R. Kavulla ’06 is a history concentrator in Mather House. His column appears on alternate Tuesdays.