Word: cores
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Since its phase-in process began in 1979, the Core has, in the words of Associate Dean Sidney Verba, released some long pent-up energies in the Harvard community. The Core has attracted many of Harvard's most senior and renowned professors, from Stanley Hoffmann, Ezra Vogel, Emily Vermeule, and Bernard Bailyn to Nobel Prize-winning scientists back to undergraduate and especially freshman teaching. In addition, while many of the Core courses are simply General Education re-treads, often lacking even the discreteness of a change in name, there has been new Faculty collaboration producing what has been called...
...there is a higher standard of evaluation for a collegiate curriculum. As Dean Rosovsky pointed out in his Dean's report, a curriculum must fulfill two main objectives: It must 1) define basic educational aims and 2) establish a common basis for intellectual discourse. During this year, when the Core and its requirements must be reviewed and finally approved by the Faculty, the real question is whether the Core actually fulfills these objectives...
Clearly recognizing that the chaotic collection of courses under the rubric of General Education was not providing Harvard students with anything like a liberal education, the administrative and Faculty bodies re-designing the curriculum advocated the need for a "Core" curriculum. The idea of a core was not novel. In 1945, when the General Education program was originally proposed in the Redbook--General Education in a Free Society--the Harvard curriculum, like those of many other liberal arts institutions, defined a body of knowledge which the Faculty considered essential for every educated person to know by virtue of being educated...
...Wilson task force, the faculty committee which considered curricular changes explicitly rejected this traditional conception while usurping the title "core curriculum" for its proposal. It wanted a "mandatory core curriculum based not on some theoretical division or hierarchical ordering of knowledge, but rather on 'distinctive ways of thinking that are identifiable and important.'" On many separate occasions both Dean Rosovsky and Dean Verba have re-emphasized their view that a curriculum cannot be based on a core of knowledge. A Core curriculum in their view is to insure that each educated college graduate has a core of "skills" or "habits...
...entire structure of the Core and its very course offerings emphasized the importance of techniques. By making students choose eight courses from among the 100 core courses, the Harvard Faculty has institutionalized its unwillingness to decide what things are more fundamental and what less fundamental to a liberal arts education. Further, the approval of courses on such varied and narrow topics as "Monuments of Japan." "The Novel in East Asia." "The Great Rebellion: Britain 1640-1660," "The Civilization of South American Indians" "Empire of the Mongols," "The Development of the String Quartet" and others in the same vein does...