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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...
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...
...early 2003, Dean Kirby kicked off the Curricular Review by bravely declaring, “We must overhaul the system by which students are, and more often, are not, given academic advice by faculty.” Scores of Faculty freshman advisers were recruited. Yet strangely, the fully overhauled system will have less Faculty advising than the old, not more. There are now undergraduate peer advisers and an Advising Programs Office with nine staff members. But next fall, no professor will advise any first-term sophomore. All sophomore advisors will be House tutors. Even professors who are members of House...
...biggest missed opportunity of the review was the opportunity to serve our students. Harvard has become far more diverse over the past 30 years, not only in gender and in ethnicity, but in the socio-economic status of its students. In the past few years, the number of students with very low family incomes has increased dramatically. Those students, though they are just as able and ambitious as other students, tend to be poorly prepared for Harvard’s coursework. Equivalent SAT scores do not imply equal preparation for Harvard...
Harvard admits the best students from the best high schools in America and also the best students from the worst high schools in America. Nothing in the Curricular Review acknowledged that many American high schools have gotten worse over the past 30 years and that the demographic of the Harvard student body has changed. Family income and social class affect preparedness for courses such as Life Sciences 1a and 1b, our new one-size-fits-all introductory sequence in the life sciences...