Count More Classes

Much can be lost in translation. This is something that the three members of the committee that will draft the Faculty legislation that would implement the new general education curriculum should keep at the front of their minds. The committee may think—in the words of committee member and Weary Professor of German and Comparative Literature Judith L. Ryan—that it is engaging only in “translation.” It nevertheless holds broad power to affect the educations of a generation of Harvard students by determining the minutiae of implementation that students will have to deal with constantly. We hope the committee uses its power wisely to ensure that both current and future students have a wide range of choice in the classes they take at Harvard.

The Core Curriculum suffers from narrow restrictions and from an overly bureaucratic Core Office. Only 82 departmental courses are cross-listed for Core credit in the Courses of Instruction. Of those, 44 are concentrated in three of the Core’s 11 areas. A mere two departmental classes are listed as options for Foreign Cultures and Literature and Arts C, and only three can count for Moral Reasoning. Given that there are nearly 1,000 pages of course listings, the restrictions unduly limit students’ ability to take the classes they are interested in and force students to take large and poorly-taught courses.

Every semester, students are frustrated when their petitions to count additional classes are rejected, often based on the rule that no class without a midterm and a final will be considered. The Task Force on General Education’s recent report specifically rejects this, asserting that the new Standing Committee on General Education “should not impose a one-format-fits-all standard (amount of reading, number of exams, and so on) on general education courses.” It is up to the legislative committee to write this lenient philosophy into the new general education system and to construct a Standing Committee on General Education that is more flexible than its current counterpart.

It is also up to Faculty legislation—which would presumably be drafted by the same committee—to deal with the transition period between the Core and the new general education system, which will likely not come into force for several years so that new classes can be designed. We hope that current students who will never see the new program will nonetheless benefit from the task force’s insight; the Core Office should not delay in relaxing its restrictions on departmental courses

That process is already beginning in fits and starts. Halfway through last fall’s shopping period, three of the new humanities courses were approved for Literature and Arts A, and only then because Dean of the Faculty Jeremy R. Knowles and Dean of the College Benedict H. Gross ’71 decided to bypass the Core Standing Committee and approve the classes themselves. Similarly, students in English 125, “Shakespeare and Modern Culture,” received official notification only yesterday that it, too, will count for Literature and Arts A—four weeks into spring semester.

The expansion of the Core, however, must be greatly expedited. When next year’s Courses of Instruction is printed, we hope that it already contains not only these classes, but a much longer list of departmental courses for every area of the Core. To that end, we urge the Faculty to write increased leniency with Core exemptions into the legislation that implements the new system in order to improve the curriculum during the transition.

Once such legislation is in place, approving vast numbers of departmental courses will involve much less red tape. For instance, a whole slew of history conference courses, which do not count because they do not give finals, could count for Historical Studies credit by next year.

The committee should also, of course, make sure that adequate resources are devoted to developing new classes. If that does not happen four years of reevaluation will result only in a realignment of requirements. But as the Faculty devotes its energy to creating courses for the new program, we hope that it does not forget the Classes of 2008, 2009, and 2010 by leaving them stranded with a broken and anachronistic system. Including an expansion of departmental alternatives in the Faculty legislation itself will make sure that does not happen.