Dean Kirby's Letter to the Faculty on Progress of Curricular Review

January 20, 2006

Dear Colleagues:

As you well know, three years ago our Faculty began a comprehensive review of the undergraduate educational experience at Harvard College. In April 2004 the Report on the Harvard College Curricular Review was issued, laying out a series of fundamental recommendations. Over the last year and a half, a further sequence of committees, comprised of faculty and students, have met to review more closely the heart of what we do here.

These reports are all now ready for the Faculty's deliberation. Please take the time to read them carefully. They are the collective work of more than one hundred of your colleagues and two dozen of our students. They have been discussed in Faculty Meetings and in other settings, and several of them have been revised in the light of comments from you and your colleagues. In all, nearly sixty final recommendations will have been made to the Faculty. They cover many fronts, but they share in common a guiding principle of the April 2004 Report: [1]

"[W]e seek to broaden the scope of a liberal education and to expand choices for Harvard College students, crafting an undergraduate curriculum that is defined less by the requirements that it places on students and more by the commitments that the Faculty makes to undergraduate education in the liberal tradition."

Let me comment briefly on the individual reports before returning to the larger picture. The Committee on General Education proposes to replace the Core Program with a curriculum at once broad and deep, opening up the entire Courses of Instruction for the general education of our students, empowering Departments to craft curricula for broader audiences, while summoning the Faculty to mount a new set of foundational courses to serve as 'portals' to large and important areas of knowledge.

The Educational Policy Committee has reviewed the purpose, structure, timing and scope of concentrations. Its several recommendations-for example, of later concentration choice and the creation of secondary fields-aim to make the Freshman year a time of true exploration, the upper-class experience one of multiple immersions, and all four years ones of meaningful student-faculty engagement.

The Committee on Writing and Speaking argues that the teaching of writing and speaking must be newly integrated into departments and degree programs. It calls for a major reorganization and renewal of our efforts in those domains. The Committee on Science and Technology has recommended a new set of introductory courses in the natural and applied sciences, the first fruit of which debuted this autumn, to considerable praise: Life Sciences 1a and 1b. The Committee on Advising and Counseling addresses, in the most comprehensive report this Faculty has ever produced on the topic, our severe deficiencies in academic advising and suggests multiple paths to improvement, in the knowledge that greater freedom of choice only underscores the need for strong mentoring and advising.

The Committee on Education Abroad recommends that all Harvard College students pursue a significant international experience during their time in the College. Working with our Office for International Programs it has overseen a broad expansion of our programs abroad and has proposed standards for the forms of international study, research, internship and public service opportunities that would meet this expectation . The Committee on Pedagogical Improvement tells us how we can evaluate better teaching and learning across the College and how, as an undergraduate college at the center of a research university, we might further the development of communities of learning. And the Committee on a January Term imagines how, in the event of a change in calendar, this dark and cold month, in which our students currently pass weeks of unstructured time culminating in final examinations, might instead be a time of imagination and innovation.

What are the common principles underlying all these efforts? There are several, and they are important. From the beginning of this review, our most important aim has been to re - commit our Faculty to the central task of educating undergraduates. As Harvard grew into a major research university over the course of the past century, faculty time and energy has naturally been drawn also to graduate education and to professional activities beyond the Yard. Yet Harvard College remains at the heart of our enterprise, attracting the best students in the world, setting standards for excellence across and beyond the University. We take pride in the fact that so many colleagues and students have taken part in the Working Groups of our first year and the review committees of the past eighteen months; that faculty and students alike have produced substantial essays on education at Harvard; [2] and that every department and concentration is now discussing curricular renewal.

Ours is a recommitment to liberal education. "Among the liberal arts," wrote Montaigne, "let us begin with the art that liberates us." [3] Montaigne was referring to a process whereby previously unexplored beliefs and values are challenged as well as unsuspected dimensions of the self discovered and nurtured in order that students may become "wiser and better" for themselves and for society. Liberal education presumes that a broad education will liberate the individual by offering opportunities for foundational knowledge, reflection and analysis, artistic creativity and an appreciation for the precision of scientific concepts and experiments. It stresses Bildung over Übung, emphasizing disinterested knowledge for its own sake, resisting pressures for early specialization and professionalization. Professional education is in the proud tradition of many great universities, but it is not the mission of our undergraduate college. Our students will devote some significant part of their time to special and concentrated learning, but we aspire above all that they graduate having developed their intellectual, artistic, moral, and civic capacities as independent thinkers with a lifetime of learning still before them. That is what we mean when we welcome our graduates to the "fellowship of educated women and men."

Our students will enter a globalizing world of national conflicts, of scientific advance and moral challenge, of political choice and economic uncertainty, of artistic imagination and cultural repression. There is no "one-size-fits-all" educational menu for such alternative futures, nor would one be appropriate for the enormously diverse talents that comprise the student body at Harvard College. Thus, while there are of course many curricular routes to liberal education, the one proposed in these reports sets out a curriculum of choice, incentive, and opportunity more than one of restriction and requirement. It aims to allow our students to shape their education, even as it gives departments and individual faculty greater responsibility in helping to shape it. It permits our curriculum to evolve, as areas of knowledge advance.

Required courses have captive audiences, and, as we have seen in our previous curricular reforms, short intellectual half-lives. If our new, foundational curriculum in the life, physical, and engineering sciences is to succeed, let it be because it is better conceived and better taught, not because any one part of it is compulsory. If new Courses in General Education are to make their mark in the lineage of great Harvard courses, let it be because they are great courses, not because they are mandated. If, as we expect, the study of the broader world and the languages spoken in it continues to expand, let this be not because of enlarged requirements (for true fluency no requirement could be large enough) but as a result of a new set of opportunities at home and abroad that will make every Harvard undergraduate degree one with a deeply international imprint.

The reforms proposed in our reports make it clear that a liberal education must be the shared endeavor of faculty and students alike. It is an education fostered not only in classrooms and laboratories but also by individual conversation and advising. Students and faculty must truly engage one another, close up, and not at a distance. The most consistent-and most accurate-criticism of a Harvard education today is that student-faculty contact is much too limited. Our current system of concentrations decants too many students, much too early, into too few concentrations that are too large. Our Core Program funnels too many students into too few courses that are on the whole too big. To be sure, large concentrations and big courses can be of outstanding quality-that is presumably one reason for their popularity; but in both concentrations and our current Core, our academic culture is too often one of mutual avoidance between student and professor. Taken together, our expansion of the Faculty, the growth of Freshman seminars, the opening up of general education, the delay in the timing of Concentration choice, and the proposal for secondary fields all have behind them the purpose of bringing our students and faculty together in intensive, inescapable ways, making it possible-indeed making it expected-that students and faculty can engage in small groups settings from the beginning of the Freshman year, and as the rule, not as the exception. After all, if we bring to Cambridge (we know) the best students and (we trust) the best faculty, should they not engage with each other, and learn from each other, rather more directly than they do? I am convinced that only if we succeed in this effort can we hope to contest the view that the better part of a Harvard education lies outside the classroom.

The history of our curricular reforms in the past century shows that Harvard has been better at making large curricular statements than it has been in improving the teaching of its undergraduates. We should be pleased for this Faculty to engage in a firm defense of the ideals of liberal education-vulnerable here as anywhere-but only if, in the same moment, we really improve what we do here. We should aspire that Harvard College prove itself to be the equal in teaching, mentoring, and inspiration to any of the great small liberal arts colleges in the American tradition, while setting itself apart by virtue of its position at the heart of a large and international research university.

This broad scrutiny of our collective teaching endeavor is now in its third year. The time has come to move forward with our formal deliberations and toward the legislation that we think appropriate in the light of the recommendations these reports incorporate. In the coming semester we will set before the Faculty the recommendations first on concentrations and then on general education. We will hear further on the recommendations on writing and speaking. We will bear in mind the implications of all of these for the recommendations on advising, which colleagues have already received. If, after we have discussed the broad outline of curricular change, the planets remain in alignment, we can then revisit the question of when we teach, that is, the matter of our academic calendar.

As we move from a time of consultation and recommendation to a term of formal discussion and decision, we should bear in mind how much we have accomplished already. We have made great progress in the expansion of the Faculty that I announced in the letter transmitting the April 2004 Report. A larger Faculty is a necessary, though not sufficient, condition for the improvement of undergraduate education. To foster small-group instruction, we have further expanded the Freshman Seminar Program to offer enough seminars to accommodate the entire freshman class. To give our students an education in the broader world in which they will work, we have expanded swiftly the opportunities and assistance for international study so that already today more than half of our students pursue a significant international experience before graduation. To promote a deeper level of scientific literacy, we are not only planning, but we have also begun to teach parts of a fundamentally new science curriculum, the first of our 'portal' courses. To mentor and support our students more effectively, we are overhauling completely the structures of academic advising in the College. And of course we have continued to talk, argue, and engage with one another, ever more deeply, about the importance of undergraduate education.

I look forward to our continued discussion and our continued progress.

Sincerely yours,

[William C. Kirby]

[1] A Report on the Harvard College Curricular Review (April 2004), p. 7.

[2] See the thoughtful faculty Essays on General Education in Harvard College (October, 2004); and the provocative analyses in Emily Riehl and Danny Yagen, eds., Student Essays: On the Purpose and Structure of a Harvard Education (October, 2005).

[3] The Complete Essays of Montaigne , trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1948), p. 117.