Don’t Block the Box

It’s time to start stocking up on conversation material. In 2009, millions of lights will go out across America, marking the dawn of a new era: an era without analog television. As static flickers across sets from California to Cambridge, families who haven’t spoken for years except during commercial breaks will be forced to turn to one another and catch up. I imagine that the first exclamation out of some people’s mouths will be: “Thank heavens for my liberal education!” Then I imagine the sound of millions of televisions being flung at those people’s heads.

But what will our liberal educations enable us to talk about during the great Analog Darkness of 2009? The current Core curriculum that occupies approximately one quarter of every Harvard undergraduate’s course-load exists because, in the words of the 2007-8 Courses of Instruction, “every Harvard graduate should be broadly educated, as well as trained in a particular academic specialty or concentration.” This seems to bode well for the incipient conversational Dark Ages. But wait! This broad education “does not define intellectual breadth as the mastery of a set of Great Books, or the digestion of a specific quantum of information, or the surveying of current knowledge in certain fields.” Instead, the Core is about “approaches to knowledge.” It teaches students “what kinds of knowledge and what forms of inquiry exist in these areas, how different means of analysis are acquired, how they are used, and what their value is.” Somehow, it manages to do this without actually imparting any knowledge.

This emphasis not on a common base of reference but a common set of “approaches” leaves Harvard students seeking to fulfill the Core with the choice between rigorous introductory courses geared towards prospective concentrators and unbelievably abstruse Core classes about topics like Boll Weevils in 1680s Holland. Few survey courses remain that offer a comprehensive view for students not planning to pursue further studies in given subjects. This phenomenon has the bizarre result that, often, only concentrators can put their knowledge in context. Most non-concentrators are marooned on islands of specific knowledge in a sea of ignorance, along with one or two other non-concentrators and someone from the Extension School who is starting to smell funny.

This bodes ill for conversation. As far as Harvard is concerned, Student A, who has taken a survey course on English classics, and Student B, who has learned “How to Escape from the Feminine Voice” from “Women Writers in Imperial China,” have had equivalent experiences. In the Analog Darkness of 2009, A will turn to B and attempt to talk about literature. “I know how to escape from the feminine voice,” B will say. Awkward silence will ensue.

For those of us who grew up with analog and won’t still be around at Harvard for the new Gen Ed curriculum, this prospect strikes fear into our hearts. Analog showed us a side of television later generations will not witness: the side where everyone is slightly green, and people shift in and out of focus when you step near to the antenna. Those of us who return home to cathode-ray tubes each vacation must consider the Analog Darkness whenever we choose Core classes. What kind of post-television exchanges will “Dinosaurs and their Relatives” lead to? How about “Justice”? Will our television-bereft parents enjoy whimsical hypotheticals about trolley cars and the morbidly obese? Will our liberal education prepare us adequately for the static ahead?

Former Yale president Kingman Brewster, Jr., said that a liberal education “makes it less likely that you will be bored with life ... and less likely that you will be a bore to those around you.” Besides the fact that this could be more reassuring—for the price of my tuition, I would prefer to be “guaranteed scintillating”—will our liberal education achieve even this modest goal? Forget preparing us for our future as citizens. What about our future as conversationalists? Especially because a full 12% of those who know the Analog Darkness is coming intend to abandon television altogether when it strikes.

Given the state of Harvard’s general education, I hope these people have seriously considered what they will talk about. I am often tormented by visions of conversations in the post-analog world that run something like this: “How was your day?” “Fine.” “Did I tell you about the Icon-Ritual Text of Medieval Russia?” “Yes … I’m going to buy a new TV.”

What Harvard’s Core fails to take into account is the fact that a conversation requires two people. We may share “approaches,” but the lack of a common base of reference dooms any real exchange. When 2009 strikes and we begin to bore those around us with our keen insights into the boll weevil, we will be forced to demand more from the Core and the promised Gen Ed. We will ask it to deliver on the promise of liberal education, to make us more interesting, to give our entertainment-starved families something to do on Saturday nights instead of just sitting around trying to recreate their favorite past episodes of America’s Most Wanted.

Or we could just get a digital converter box.



Alexandra A. Petri ’10 is an English concentrator in Eliot House. Her column appears regularly.