Word: curriculums
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Similarly, it is not clear how professors outside of Harris’s committee will be involved in the implementation of the new curriculum and in approving courses for Gen Ed credit; the legislation says that professors—particularly department chairs—should be consulted, but it does not define the manner or frequency of such consultations...
Presidents, deans, and professors have completed the policy phase of Harvard’s Curricular Review. The General Education curriculum had a difficult birth. Former University President Lawrence H. Summers and former Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences William C. Kirby orphaned the Core Curriculum in 2003, without a vision of what should replace it. When a dazzling replacement did not develop quickly, the President disappeared from the discussion and was not heard from again. A year ago, an increasingly leaderless Faculty proposed a simple distribution requirement...
Last fall, the Task Force on General Education issued an inspired and dramatic report, parts of which drew heavy Faculty criticism. The Task Force revised its report twice, and then was dissolved. As Faculty legislation was drafted and amended, no visionary shaped the curriculum. A largely interim administration was determined to get something—anything—voted on before the end of the year. Area boundaries were stretched to accommodate departments excluded from the Task Force recommendations. The result is an oddly divided and rather too large distribution requirement, leaving us questioning what exactly happened...
Intellectual exploration was a watchword of the early stages of the review. Interdisciplinarity was another. Yet when we separated colliding fields in the General Education curriculum and sought to include everything somewhere, we wound up with an eight-course requirement. A tautly drawn six, pushing some fields together and omitting others, would have been better: In the new system, students may have less curricular freedom than ever. Our years of weak leadership will translate into thousands of extra course requirements for each entering class...
Under the new curriculum, freshmen will again be laying out four-year grids showing what to do in which term to achieve everything they must do—or feel they must do in order to distinguish themselves. Advising will be about filling slots, not expanding the mind. No one will want to take a course unless it accomplishes something...