Word: coreness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...real problem with Harvard's curriculum, though, is not that the Core is too foreign; rather, it is entirely too familiar. So many Core courses deal with the present or recent past--"The Warren Court" in Historical Studies B and "Industrial East Asia" in Foreign Cultures, for instance--that students are tempted to explore the cozy space within their current horizons rather than take a broadening course. Also, it seems that every ethnicity is recognized with at least one course, allowing students, in effect, to study the subject with which they are already (and quite inevitably) most familiar: themselves...
Which is fine, and maybe beneficial, so long as other courses are sufficiently foreign. Trouble is, several of the most promising courses seem determined to make attractively difficult material into familiar, almost banal, fare. Professor Michael Sandel's well-known and well-respected Core course concluded recently to a much deserved, if customary, standing ovation. "Justice," undoubtedly one of the best taught Cores, examines great philosophers and practical present-day applications of their theories, bringing daunting philosophies to bear on familiar contemporary debates...
...reading Hegel, wrote to his father, "There are moments in one's life which are like frontier posts marking the completion of a period but at the same time indicating a new direction." Or John Stuart Mill whose intellectual crisis at age 20 led to mental breakdown--would that Core courses made Harvard students prone to similar breakdowns...
...faraway lands. Students are politically apathetic, we're told by countless pundits who 30 years ago proved conclusively the virtues of the same apathy they now decry. But political apathy isn't as much the problem as is intellectual lethargy--a much more troubling ailment in which so many Core courses are complicit...
Ryan says PSLM has been successful because University policy does not conflict with the campaign's core demands regarding sweatshop labor...