Gen Ed Approves Thirteen

The General Education Standing Committee approved 13 classes at its meeting last Thursday, bringing the total of courses approved for the new Gen Ed curriculum to 39.

Among the new inductees is the popular Moral Reasoning 22: “Justice,” taught by Government professor Michael J. Sandel.

Routinely one of the largest courses at the College, “Justice” received approval as part of the new “Ethical Reasoning” course category.

The once-empty “Science of the Physical Universe” category now contains one class: Science A-49: “The Physics of Music and Sound.” All eight Gen Ed categories now contain at least one course.

“The pace of approval is picking up because most professors have adapted their proposals to the committee’s first round of comments and resubmitted them,” Gen Ed committee member John M. Sheffield II ’09 wrote in an e-mailed statement. “We’ve seen a glut of revised syllabi in the last few weeks.”

Students who were worried that Literature and Arts B-51: “First Nights: Five Performance Premieres” may not be taught again can now rest assured—it will count both toward the Core and Gen Ed’s Aesthetic and Interpretive Understanding requirement in Fall 2009.

The majority of newly approved classes come from the humanities. Five will count toward the “Culture and Belief” requirement, and another five will count toward “Aesthetic and Interpretive Understanding.”

Culture and Belief 13: “The Contested Bible: The Sacred-Secular Dance” will be taught by Gen Ed committee chair Jay M. Harris in Spring 2009.

Another three Culture and Belief classes will also be new: philosophy professor Sean D. Kelly’s Culture and Belief 14: “Human Being and the Sacred in the History of the West”; Slavic literature professor Julie Buckler’s Culture and Belief 15: “The Presence of the Past”; and Lisa T. Brooks’ Folklore and Mythology 126: “Continuing Oral Tradition in Native American Literature.”

Culture and Belief 16: “Performance, Tradition and Cultural Studies: An Introduction to Folklore and Mythology,” also counting for Culture and Belief, will be adapted from Folklore and Mythology 100.

Humanities 27, taught by English professor Stephen J. Greenblatt, will become English 127: “A Silk Road Course: Travel and Transformation on the High Seas: An Imaginary Journey in the early 17th Century” and count toward the Aesthetic and Interpretive Understanding requirement this fall.

The acting chair of the comparative literature department also saw two of her courses welcomed into the new curriculum. Susan R. Suleiman’s “French 132b. 20th-Century French Fiction II: The Experimental Mode” and Literature & Arts C-55: “Surrealism: Avant-Garde Art and Politics between the Wars” were approved for the Aesthetic and Interpretive Understanding category.

English professor Helen Vendler’s class, Literature and Arts A-22: “Poems, Poets, Poetry,” will also count toward Aesthetic and Interpretive Understanding.

History professor Charles S. Maier’s class, History 1418, will be adapted into Ethical Reasoning 12: “Political Justice and Political Trials” this fall.

—Staff writer Bonnie J. Kavoussi can be reached at kavoussi@fas.harvard.edu.