Like a Rolling Stone

Four innovators of the undergraduate curriculum yesterday told a Sever Hall audience that the College's instruction has never stopped developing during the last 50 years.

"Innovation is so much a part of this place that each year there are essays on new developments, new concentrations, new changes in the departments and what have you," said the Ford Professor of Ancient and Modern History Franklin L. Ford.

Ford, dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences from 1962 to 1970 and again in 1973, presided over the symposium, "The Harvard Curriculum: Evolution and Innovation 1936-1986."

Shattuck Professor of Government James Q. Wilson headed the group that developed the Core Curriculum in the 1970s. The program requires students to receive instruction in a variety of disciplines and is a model for schools across the nation.

"The contention was made that we had to understand modes of inquiry, how scientists, sociologists, artists, philosophers understand human nature and the world," Wilson said, explaining the impetus for the Core Curriculum.

Curriculum development is often influenced by "a tension between guiding and turning loose" the creative potential of undergraduates, said Anthony G. Oettinger '51, McKay Professor of Applied Mathematics. Oettinger was a primary developer of the freshman seminar program.

Coolidge Professor of History David S. Landes, one of the fathers of the interdisciplinary Social Studies program, also took part in the symposium.