Kirby Outlines Broad Schedule for Completion of Review

After three years of committee meetings and draft reports, the Harvard College Curricular Review is finally moving to a period of “formal discussion and decision” that will include much-awaited legislation, Dean of the Faculty William C. Kirby announced in a letter to the Faculty of Arts and Sciences today.

While the letter did not lay out a concrete schedule of when the Faculty will vote on elements of the review, Kirby did suggest a broad outline of the order in which reports will be discussed at Faculty meetings in the coming semester.

The report of the Educational Policy Committee (EPC), which recommended delaying concentration choice by a semester and allowing students to study a “secondary field” in addition to their primary concentration, will be discussed first, the letter said. In an e-mail to The Crimson this afternoon, Kirby said that he hoped to hold a vote on the EPC recommendations in the first half of the spring semester.

That vote will be followed by debate on the Report of the Committee on General Education, which called for drastically reworking the undergraduate curriculum by eliminating the Core and replacing it with a combination of broad distribution requirements and optional “foundational courses.”

Kirby, in the e-mail, said that a vote on the General Education requirements could occur this spring “after much more discussion.”

“We should never vote until we’re ready, but at the same time we do need to draw conclusions from these recommendations,” Kirby wrote.

Following votes on the EPC and General Education reports, the Faculty will turn to other elements of the review, which recommended better organization of Harvard’s advising resources and a more integrated approach to the teaching of writing and speaking.

If “the planets remain in alignment” after these discussions, Kirby wrote in his letter to the Faculty, there will be talk this coming semester about the Report of the Committee on a January Term, which envisioned a calendar that would move exams to December and allow students to use January as a time for other opportunities.

Aside from briefly summarizing the eight curricular review reports, Kirby’s five page letter touched on several broad themes in the review: the desire to “re-commit our Faculty to the central task of educating undergraduates,” a focus on “resisting pressures for early specialization and professionalization,” and a need for a “curriculum of choice, incentive, and opportunity.”

The review, the College’s first since the 1970s, has been beset by delays over the past year and dogged by criticism that it lacks bold new ideas. An article in The New York Times on Jan. 8 noted that the General Education report contained concepts already produced by curricular reviews at Yale and other peer institutions, and said that the report “landed on many desks not so much with a thud as a rustle.”

But in his letter to the Faculty today, Kirby insisted that this review was about improving education, not making big news.

“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,” Kirby wrote in the letter. “We should be pleased for this Faculty to engage in a firm defense of the ideals of a liberal education—vulnerable here as anywhere—but only if, in the same moment, we really improve what we do here.”

While the review moves into its final phase, it remains to be determined when the full impact of its suggested changes will be felt by the student body.

The Faculty still appears divided on several issues, including whether a moral reasoning requirement should be added to the General Education structure. But if some votes are completed in the seven Faculty meetings scheduled for the spring semester, students could begin to see changes next year.

Kirby wrote in an e-mail to The Crimson yesterday that while it could take “a two to three year period of development” to implement new foundational Courses in General Education across the four divisions of the College, it would be “theoretically possible to move to more open distribution sooner than new general education courses (departmental and beyond) are available.”

Some professors have suggested “instant implementation” for the new distribution requirements, meaning that students starting with the Class of 2007 would have the choice between completing the requirements of the Core or fulfilling a simpler distribution system. But the Faculty has yet to discuss that proposal in great depth.

—Staff writer Evan H. Jacobs can be reached at ehjacobs@fas.harvard.edu.