A Vote for Vacuity

The meetings have ended, the smoke is white, and Harvard College has a brand new curriculum. The infamous Core Curriculum, a relic of the last Bok administration, has finally been sent to its demise and in its place will stand a new general education system.

This metamorphosis took some of the world’s greatest minds over four years to complete, and their effort is apparent: the fields of study required of every Harvard student have been summarily renamed. Fret no longer about that mundane Moral Reasoning final; it’s an Ethical Reasoning final now. And instead of studying history at the macro and micro level, we will divide our two courses between the U.S. and the rest of the world. Even more impressive than these verbal acrobatics, exemptions to requirements have been eliminated; the general education program will have a faculty member at its helm; and, of course, the general education committee will have a new set of course categories to police. The faculty should be congratulated for this stunning revolution.

Alas, the new system in fact remains diffuse and diluted. With every academic faction in the College insisting that no student should graduate without taking their course, the resulting proposal was uninspiring, with the catchall categories of the Core dressed up in lofty rhetoric. What ought to have been an incisive, practical new plan devolved into another exercise in esoterica. In the end, general education is a case study in the frustrating nature of Harvard politics, characterized by institutional inertia and politically correct banality.

We wonder if even the curriculum’s designers admire its startling unoriginality. Former Dean of the Faculty, William C. Kirby’s words on the vote were reminiscent of Communist China (as he acknowledged): "The motion was passed unanimously although many comrades were opposed." It is no doubt difficult to get even a fraction of our faculty to agree on anything, but their lingering concerns with regard to this important vote point to serious flaws.

The largest flaw is that the implementation of the document’s nebulous recommendations has been left to an all-powerful standing committee. This has been the greatest weakness of the Core, as it allowed it to deteriorate into an inflexible mire whereby exemptions are few and far between and students are frequently forced to take mediocre classes that hold no interest.

The Faculty’s lack of enthusiasm is also disconcerting because the ostensible purpose of the curricular review was to reinvigorate the curriculum and to create new classes. Faced with this uninspiring "new" rubric, faculty will be more likely to simply adapt their Core course to the new rubric, creating Core version 2.0.

And yet we dare to hope. The dwindling dream of a successful general education still lies entirely in its implementation, which is in the hands of the new Standing Committee on general education. Although this will allow the system to stray from its original purpose in the long run, the committee’s blank check will empower them to make substantial changes in implementing the new system.

In the interests of the students for whom much ink has been spilt, we beseech the Committee to stray from the constrictiveness of the Core Curriculum in favor of flexibility and freedom for students, creating system that does not tyrannize students with its narrowness. If they err in this regard, general education will amount to nothing but a shiny new set of hoops through which each undergraduate must joylessly jump. But they have the power to improve on the current system’s frustrating inflexibility, even if it is too late to save the whole curricular review.