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Recovering the core
For years, Harvard has struggled to articulate a core undergraduate curriculum that is coherent and substantive. So complicated and conflicted have those struggles been that they led a dean to resign and contributed to the downfall of Lawrence Summers. But things may have begun to take a turn for the better.
On Wednesday, The Harvard Crimson broke the news that the committee tasked with designing a new curriculum had issued a striking new report that calls for students to receive a broad, general education in seven core areas--"Cultural Traditions and Cultural Change," "The Ethical Life," "The United States," "Societies of the World," "Reason and Faith," "Life Sciences," and "Physical Sciences." Acknowledging that the current core's emphasis on narrow, discipline-specific knowledges and methodologies does not properly serve an undergraduate population that is overwhelmingly not planning to pursue academic careers and that overwhelmingly does need solid educational preparation for twenty-first century citizenship, the report does not outline how a new curriculum should be implemented or detail exactly what it would be. But it does begin to carve out a distinctive and important path. In an era of what ACTA has called "hollow cores"--curricular distribution requirements that emphasize trendy, over-specialized, disconnected niche courses--Harvard is returning to basics in a manner that has the potential to set a positive, timely example for American colleges and universities. If the report's suggestion that the new Harvard core include courses on religion and American history is implemented, Harvard would stand alone among its peer institutions.
A staff editorial issued by The Crimson praises the spirit of the report while noting that all the fine conceptions and important innovations in the world will count for nothing if the new core is not designed and implemented with particular care:
Harvard students must graduate being able to understand the issues that they will spend their lives grappling with as citizens and leaders of the world. There is no doubt that over time the precise set of issues that are most relevant will change, but the framework for education advanced in this review--more than any previous one--accommodates our rapidly changing world. Moreover, it prescribes a curriculum that by definition must keep pace with that change. We hope that this proposal is implemented with a level of flexibility that matches the boldness of its vision and anticipates the need for continued and regular renewal of its animating ideas.
Harvard has the potential to do something very important here, not only for its own students, but for students at the many schools that look to Harvard to see what to do. But reports aren't policies, devils do lie in details, and bureaucracies tend to reproduce themselves in precisely the moment that they claim to be changing. If Harvard is to succeed here, the "how" will be as important as the "what."
Posted by acta online at October 8, 2006 07:37 AM
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Comments
I'm sceptical, comme d'habitude, but very cautiously hopeful. Let Harvard start by requiring Latin, Greek, and higher mathematics (at least one year of calculus) of their undergraduates. And let them eliminate whole departments, starting with the Kennedy School of Government, AKA a liberal think-tank or, as Matthew Arnold (no mean classicist) has it, "the grand name without the grand thing". The emphasis on religion in the new proposal makes me even more suspicious, even though Harvard was founded in 1638 (I think) as a theology school. If they recruit Fr. Neuhaus, fundamentalist Protestants and orthodox Jews to teach religion classes, I might reconsider.
Cheers,
Dr JA
Posted by: Jacques Albert at October 8, 2006 10:27 AM
Is it possible the faculty is so risk averse because...
a. The academic job market is so sclerotic and mobility and the possibility for second chances so limited;
b. The professor production line is responding to occult incentives, leading to a chronic oversupply of prospective professors;
c. One has to invest so much of one's early adult life in graduate education, with so many antecedent detours.
??
Possible ameliorations:
Replace tenure with one to six year contracts;
Apply consumer protection laws to graduate programs. Fines and civil liability for programs that do not place their students might persuade institutions that they do not need so many TAs after all;
Replace the baccalaureate degree with a two-year course in one subject. End it, don't mend it.
Repairing faculty governance?
Blow it up. Producer co-operatives are well and good, when the worker-proprietors assume financial risk should the company fail or decline in performance. If you all want to be your own boss, start your own business.
Posted by: Art Deco at October 9, 2006 05:05 PM
"Apply consumer protection laws to graduate programs. Fines and civil liability for programs that do not place their students might persuade institutions that they do not need so many TAs after all"
Why not to all academic programs? Undergraduates are every bit as worthy of consumer protection guarantees as grad students.
This is a great idea. Here, the consumer protection statute grants all counsel fees, costs of litigation, plus up to treble damages to prevailing plaintiffs. I cannot fully imagine the conflagration that would result if colleges were held liable for the lasting damage they do to their own enrollees. It would sure as hell suffice to end a lot of academic corruption and fraud.
Posted by: Federal Dog at October 12, 2006 07:14 AM