After April 17 meeting, half of approved General Education courses come from current Core curriculum

With the approval of four new courses for General Education credit last week, more half the classes in the Gen Ed curriculum now come from the current Core.

On April 17, The General Education Standing Committee approved the additional courses—including Historical Studies A-13: “China, Tradition and Transformation”; Historical Studies B-40: “Pursuits of Happiness”; and Quantitative Reasoning 48: “Bits”—according to committee member Alexander “Zander” N. Li ’08. In February, the Committee also added Literature & Arts A-88: “Interracial Literature” to the Gen Ed roster, which now includes 22 courses.

According to Li, the vast majority of proposals received by the committee have been for existing Core courses, mostly in the humanities. Committee chair Jay M. Harris also said the the most represented area of the roughly 40 proposals received has been the humanities.

“It’s pretty obvious you’re not going to map out any curriculum from scratch,” said Professor Laurel Ulrich, who will begin teaching “Pursuits of Happiness” next fall. “It also seems like a terrible waste of resources to throw out courses that are working. ... It’s a question of what students are required to do and where the emphasis is going to be.”

Ulrich called her Gen Ed syllabus “an adaptation of a Core course I have been teaching for years,” but without the Core’s requirements, which she said were inflexible.

The committee has also approved several new courses in the last several weeks: “Germany in the World: 1600-2000”; “Literature Against Enlightenments”; and “Human Rights: A Philosophical Introduction.” Gen Ed requirements will supplant the Core for the class of 2013.

—Staff writer Bonnie J. Kavoussi contributed to the reporting of this story.