Welcome to High School

Welcome to the new Harvard. You never left high school. A 36-page core curriculum report released this week, the culmination of three and a half years of effort, recommends alterations to the present General Education program that would greatly restrict students' freedom to take the courses they want.

The core report breaks up the five previously outlined basic areas of study into more specific fields, and suggests that students take one half-course in each of ten subdivisions.

The most serious restriction, however, lies in the report's recommendation to regulate closely the types of courses that would fall under the rubric of "General Education."

The Gen Ed reform proposals that were the basis of the report released this week drew sharp criticism last year, although they were much less restrictive than the reforms set forth in the new core report; now a new wave of criticism is apparently in the offing.

This week the Committee on Undergraduate Education (CUE) voiced an amalgam of complaints about the report's proposals.

Several CUE members objected to the proposed elimination of pass-fail options and to the lack of departmental course alternatives. They called for student representation on proposed core curriculum committees, and recommended a rejection of the Expository Writing reforms outlined in the report.

Still, most students and Faculty members contacted said they believe the Faculty will approve the proposals more or less intact.

One CUE member said the CUE is not discussing the broader philosophical questions the report poses, because most CUE and Educational Research Group (ERG) members believe the eventual acceptance of the proposal is inevitable.

Although the new core curriculum would totally transform general education at Harvard--leaving few facets of existing programs untouched--up to this point, the Faculty seems almost complacent about overhauling the curriculum.

"The thing is the report was kept carefully under wraps before it was released," Robert V. Pound, Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics, said yesterday. "The opposition had no chance to organize since we did not know what was going on."

Apparently, that's just the way some people want it.