Defining Harvard College Courses

Harvard University is a collection of some of the most creative, daring and nimble minds the world has ever seen—but you couldn’t guess that from the progress of the Committee on General Education. The 16 members of the committee have been entrusted with the future heart of Harvard’s liberal arts education, and from the looks of it they want to punt. Unsurprisingly, last Friday a discussion of the full Faculty yielded little consensus on what should replace Harvard’s Core curriculum. More troubling, however, the Faculty seemed daunted by the still-ambiguous nature—even after so many months—of the proposals on the table. The Committee on General Education has done an admirable job grappling with the myriad competing theories of general education, but it seems to have squandered its time this semester when it should have been attempting to put these abstract visions into practical proposals.

Key aspects of the Harvard College Curricular Review (HCCR) are scheduled to come to a vote next semester, but little progress determining the nature of the proposed Harvard College Courses (HCC) seems to have been made since last April’s HCCR report. While we appreciate that the Committee on General Education is reluctant to make hasty decisions regarding these momentous choices, we are worried that the “shape” of the proposed system—as Bass Professor of Government Michael J. Sandel called it—is too lacking in definition for any substantive discussion. We heartily agree with Baird Professor of Science Gary Feldman who intimated at the meeting, “Unless we know what the purpose of general education is, then we won’t know what qualifies as general education.” The Committee on General Education is still offering vague abstractions when what is needed for any effective discussion among students and faculty are details and decisions.

Harvard’s hopes of a well-thought out, well-implemented program to replace the Core—which was neither well-thought out nor well-implemented—will be dashed upon the rocks of mediocrity and befuddlement unless the committee develops clearer objectives. They have not decided on a lucid concept of the purpose of general education, and as a result, all further discussion seems to be moving in circles. Students and faculty must know what the principles underlying the proposed system of general education are—and they must buy into it—or else the long-heralded HCCR will simply replace one meaningless slogan (“ways of knowing”) with another one, such as “essential facts.” We worry that the College is in danger of shallowly slapping a new name on the barren intellectual wasteland that sits in the first section of the course catalog. Real reform is within reach, but to succeed, the Committee must present a coherent, principled vision for the purpose of a general education requirement. Otherwise, the College is far better off implementing a simple distribution requirement.

After establishing a rationale for the purpose of general education, the Committee should provide clear practical guidance for implementation. This will require explicitly defining the criteria and justifications underling the vaunted Harvard College Courses. It also means asking whether HCC will be required, and if so, how many HCC each student must take, and in what areas. The Committee has begun to ask these questions, but answering these questions without first establishing a formidable foundation is a short-sighted shortcut.

In any event, we firmly believe that HCC should not be required at all. It is likely that they will only be the exciting, challenging and meaningful courses that they are intended to be so long as students can choose to abandon them for departmental courses en masse. Competition between courses, which is sorely lacking in the present Core, will ensure that these courses are truly the best courses Harvard offers. If they are truly as well-designed and well-taught as intended, students will want to enroll in them. If the Faculty insists on requiring at least some HCC, we hope that number will be as small as possible, with the remainder of the general education requirement distributed throughout departmental choices.

Beyond the raw numbers that will decide how HCC translate into graduation requirements, the Committee must formulate stringent requirements for what can constitute a HCC. Anyone can have a vision for HCC—we think that they should be rigorous, interdisciplinary, and focused on intellectually worthy topics that could not be covered adequately within departments—but if the Committee charts out lofty goals and aspirations for the HCC but neglects to decide what it all means in any practical sense, they have condemned the College and its students to another generation in intellectual purgatory. Saying a course should be interdisciplinary is one thing, but laying out the practical precepts by which the College can judge whether a course is sufficiently interdisciplinary to be an HCC is a step above. The Committee on General Education must exhaustively map out detailed proposals for HCC criteria in order to practically facilitate discussion before the Faculty is ready to vote.

In October, when the new HCCR committees were announced, we worried that Harvard might attempt to ram through a poorly considered implementation of April’s HCCR report without due consideration. We encouraged the committees to remain committed to the review’s purpose and not simply serve as rubber stamps. But that never meant shirking their responsibilities to ultimately make decisive decisions. No committee at Harvard will ever please everyone, particularly not a committee whose purview is the nature of a liberal education itself. If the Committee fails to come to clear conclusions and to offer systematic instructions for setting up a general education curriculum, the results will disappoint everyone. For each constituency that the Committee appeases with platitudes, hundreds of future Harvard students will be forced to pay with their educations. By putting a clear proposal up for discussion, the Committee risks inviting much criticism, but it also invites the possibility for new perspectives to improve the proposal. A vague set of recommendations without any underlying coherence of principles will only lay the foundation for failure.