Word: harvardness
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...Harvard undergraduates and prefrosh have more in common than they should. This past Visitas weekend meant the arrival of 1000 excited prospective students and, for many current members of the College, memories of their own similar experience a year or years ago. To prefrosh, Harvard can seem like a confusing place, and not just because of difficulties in navigating the campus...
Then, once the previously-bewildered enroll, Harvard life gets simpler, the intuition runs. Foreign names like “Mather” eventually take on a determinate geographic location, class schedules are ironed out, and these once-unaware students figure out what it means to be at Harvard...
...last part of this story, unfortunately, only sometimes holds true. When, for example, the Class of 2014 accepts their offers, they will join a community, but it’s not at all clear what identifies our community here at Harvard...
...little deeper and you’ll find that Harvard hesitates to say explicitly that such a common bond unites us. Undergraduates’ latest institutionally-sanctioned educational philosophy comes from the Report of the Task Force on General Education. The task force’s framing of its new set of requirements fall well short of a claim to excellence. “The general education curriculum,” the authors admonish, “does not pretend to constitute a comprehensive guide to everything that an educated person should know. There is simply too much information...
...sort of educational standard. If you were to read through the rest of the Gen Ed report, you’d find that the task force never does get around to saying whether there is any specific content whatsoever that an educated person should know. Officially, Harvard will not even broach the topic of whether specific information is necessary for education, let alone declare in what way excellence comes from academic study. In general, the language of this report centers on a rhetoric of preparation, not a rhetoric of common pursuit with one’s fellow students...