Word: cores
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Susan Lewis, Director of the Core Curriculm, has been consistently unavailable for comment and has refused to give Core enrollment figures. But, Lewis did address the issue last week in the Administration-produced Harvard Gazette. She claimed that the Core offered many small courses, pointing to 26 courses with enrollment of less than 60 students...
...Core offers too few courses in each of its 10 subject areas and consequently, large classes result. For example, last fall each area averaged a mere 4.3 course offerings, with some areas, like Moral Reasoning, offering as few as two classes. When only two classes are offered for a student body of over 6000, those classes obviously will become large and unwieldly. These large classes become, as Professor Richard Pipes told the Harvard Gazette, "like an Off-Broadway production...
Pipes hit what has become a fact of life: the transformation of the Core course into a multimedia extravaganza. After watching the far-off song and dance of Harvard's hottest star professors, the bright lights and big names have all blurred the Core into some intellectual imitation of MTV--with the depth and sincerity to match...
Unfortunately, for students dissatisfied with large class sizes, the Core offers very few alternatives to the "Monster Cores." The best courses (according to the CUE Guide) and the easiest (according to Crimson editors) are consistently huge. Thus, these students are forced to endure the inaccessibility of the professor, the bureaucracy of sectioning, the personal quirks of the teaching fellow army, and the inevitable race for the Coop's inadequate book supply...
...Core's problem is not large courses; large, popular courses exist at all universities. But the Core forces students into large courses by offering no other alternatives, as if subjecting us to inescapable hours of MTV re-runs (Help!, Michael Jackson, and Michael Sandel--All Day, All Night...