Review Axes Core Curriculum

Members of the class graduating today are familiar with the situation.

They’ve had to forgo that alluring elective—“Psychology and the Law,” “The History of Harvard and Its Presidents” or “Riemannian and Lorentzian Geometry”—to fulfill that pesky Foreign Cultures or Science B Core requirement.

Their kids probably won’t have to.

A curricular review that plans to do away with the Core curriculum released results this April to divided reactions from faculty. Among a total of 57 recommendations, it suggests axing first-year blocking groups, pushing concentration choice back a semester and creating a centralized advising system.

In conjunction with the review, a committee to coordinate calendars across Harvard recommended this spring that the College convert to a schedule that moves exams before Christmas and includes a possible January term.

In keeping with the goal of increased flexibility that administrators have touted since the review was officially launched in fall 2002, the curricular review report recommends that the College replace the 25-year-old Core with a distribution requirement of two classes in each of five areas. Provisionally, these areas will be the humanities, the social sciences, the natural sciences, the physical sciences and engineering and international perspectives.

A body of “integrative, foundational courses” known as the Harvard College Courses will replace the Core, but these will be optional—students will also be able to fulfill their general education requirements with regular departmental classes.

In an effort to de-professionalize concentrations, the report recommends capping requirements at 12 courses and abolishing the distinction between honors and non-honors concentrations. These measures would have an especially heavy impact on the sciences, whose concentrations tend to be requirement-heavy—meaning it might be harder for students to catch up should they decide to focus in science midway through their second year of college.

As part of the curricular review’s emphasis on “internationalization,” all students will be expected to pursue a “significant international experience” that will be marked on their transcript and to study a foreign language, eliminating the exception for those who are already proficient in a language.

Students will be able to complete their international experience during a possible January term proposed in the calendar report. Pforzheimer University Professor Sidney Verba ’53 chaired the committee that recommended the adoption of a 4-1-4 calendar, leaving an examless January open for a month-long academic term.

The curricular review report, which recommended the adoption of this calendar, suggested that the mini-term could be dedicated to classes or other curricular and extracurricular pursuits.

But the calendar proposal has already seen heated debate—professors rallied both for and against the possibility when it was first introduced to the full Faculty at its April meeting.

Gutman Professor of Latin American Affairs John H. Coatsworth said the new calendar, by ending the academic year earlier, would permit students to “take advantage of summer study and internship opportunities with early start dates and to combine international experiences with other summer activities.”

But others oppose the switch, saying it would cost fall instructional time and would inconvenience students and professors by beginning classes just after or even before Labor Day.

OUT OF THE BLUE?

While some of the report’s recommendations were predictable, a proposal to adopt Yale’s practice of assigning first-year students to upperclass Houses came as a surprise to several involved in the review, including the students.

Some committee members said that they were not aware of the proposal until they reviewed a draft copy of the report four days before it became available to the general public.

Joseph K. Green ’05, who served on the working group on pedagogy, said that he and the seven other students on the review working groups wrote to Harvard’s dean that they “were surprised by the freshman housing thing.”

Professor of Latin Kathleen M. Coleman, who served on the working group on concentrations, said that the recommendation of the report to cap concentration requirements at 12 came as a surprise despite a year of discussion.

“We did not discuss the issue of capping concentration requirements, although such a suggestion found its way into the report,” Coleman said at a faculty meeting in May.

And students say the review seemed to move of its own accord, whether for good or ill.

“Fortunately, and in many ways unfortunately, you could see the way the review was going from the beginning,” Green said.

Still, last month’s 67-page report, penned by Associate Dean of the College Jeffrey Wolcowitz, is far from a final version of a new curriculum.

“I think we have a good report that outlines some clear directions,” said Dean of Harvard College Benedict H. Gross ’71. But he was quick to add, “it’s a discussion document.”

The report is heavy with recommendations but light on specific prescriptions.

It does not suggest how the Harvard College Courses should be organized or delve into detail on the kinds of subjects they would cover.

Instead, the report asks that “the Dean, in consultation with the Faculty, set out the specific criteria for Harvard College Courses, and define the structure of requirements for general education.”

Emery Professor of Chemistry Eric N. Jacobsen said the makeup of the four working groups, and the short timeframe in which they operated, made it infeasible to formulate more specific recommendations.

“I realize fully that the recommendation for the Harvard College Courses lacks any sort of detail,” he said.

Other faculty members have criticized the report for its absence of a “guiding” philosophy akin to those of the reviews of the 1950s and 1970s.

“While I appreciate the report’s broad contours...it still remains to develop a guiding vision,” Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures Julie A. Buckler told the Faculty at its May 18 meeting.

Others cited a disconnect between the professors on the working groups and the administrators in charge of the review.

Coleman wrote in an e-mail after that Faculty meeting that seven of the 14 concentration recommendations in the final report were not contained in the report of her group—and some, including the concentration cap, “do not mesh with the spirit of our discussions.”

“None of the working groups collaborated with any of the others,” she said at the last regular Faculty meeting of the year in May.

But Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences William C. Kirby said all proposals in the final report were “strongly endorsed” by the curricular review’s steering committee, of which each working group’s co-chairs were members.

Some of the recommendations, Kirby said in an interview, will require no vote by the Faculty at large. The Faculty will vote on any proposals that change graduation requirements or “fundamentally change the nature of the curriculum,” he said.

—Staff writer Laura L. Krug can be reached at krug@fas.harvard.edu.