Word: review
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...current review committee's approach to the Core intends to refine, rather than revolutionize, the current system. This will disappoint many people. I have been passionately implored by more than one senior to destroy the Core as a favor to them before they graduate. (Sorry, guys.) What will result (or, rather, what may result; the committee will not finish deliberations until the next academic year) is a less monolithic Core more amenable to departmental bypasses...
...administration (from which I exclude the Review Committee) appears to lack faith in our interest in our own education. That lack of confidence is evidenced by their creating an artificial set of courses that, at least in the course catalogue, are billed as teaching us primarily approaches to a particular field and only incidentally material from the field itself. Most undergraduates of my acquaintance are, in fact, quite good at figuring things out for themselves and would be able to extrapolate approaches to literature in general from "English 140b: The Age of Johnson" or "Latin 110: Neronian Literature...
Making the Core more flexible will, of course, create an administrative nightmare. But any changes proposed by the review committee will make life a little more difficult for the administration and faculty. For example, there is talk of making the QRR a course requirement rather than an exam (calm down; nothing's been decided yet) and increasing the number of Core exemptions to compensate...
...review committee is, as far as I can tell, rational and earnest and genuinely interested in providing us with a liberal arts education. I was skeptical at the beginning about the administration's power over the Core and about students' role on the review committee. Some professors and students have asked me if the committee has some sort of political agenda, if it favors the sciences over the humanities. But contrary to these suspicions, I have not noticed any bias in committee meetings...
...effective, Core reform should mediate the tension between what we think we want and what Harvard thinks is good for us. I do not think that the review committee has reached a complete synthesis of this yet, but may very well come up with something feasible by the end of the review process in the 1996-97 academic year...