A Bitter Core

"I must confess an increasing sense of unease," wrote Dean of the Faculty Henry Rosovsky in his annual report of 1975-1976, when "at every Commencement the President of Harvard University welcomes new graduates of the college 'to the company of educated men and women.'" This visceral queasiness and a sense of the need for a re-articulation of "educational priorities" led the Dean and the Harvard Faculty to reject the General Education program and create the "Core" curriculum.

Since its phase-in process began in 1979, the Core has, in the words of Associate Dean Sidney Verba, released some long pent-up energies in the Harvard community. The Core has attracted many of Harvard's most senior and renowned professors, from Stanley Hoffmann, Ezra Vogel, Emily Vermeule, and Bernard Bailyn to Nobel Prize-winning scientists back to undergraduate and especially freshman teaching. In addition, while many of the Core courses are simply General Education re-treads, often lacking even the discreteness of a change in name, there has been new Faculty collaboration producing what has been called "an impressive number of interesting and attractive new courses." Finally, the Core, taken as a whole, seems to be more popular with students than most Faculty and administrators anticipated since students are enrolling in Core courses as electives.

However, unlike political elections, movies, and TV shows, the worthiness of a liberal education curriculum is not determined by popularity. While voluntary participation of both faculty and students is absolutely essential, there is a higher standard of evaluation for a collegiate curriculum. As Dean Rosovsky pointed out in his Dean's report, a curriculum must fulfill two main objectives: It must 1) define basic educational aims and 2) establish a common basis for intellectual discourse. During this year, when the Core and its requirements must be reviewed and finally approved by the Faculty, the real question is whether the Core actually fulfills these objectives.

Clearly recognizing that the chaotic collection of courses under the rubric of General Education was not providing Harvard students with anything like a liberal education, the administrative and Faculty bodies re-designing the curriculum advocated the need for a "Core" curriculum. The idea of a core was not novel. In 1945, when the General Education program was originally proposed in the Redbook--General Education in a Free Society--the Harvard curriculum, like those of many other liberal arts institutions, defined a body of knowledge which the Faculty considered essential for every educated person to know by virtue of being educated. And this "core" of knowledge unabashedly focused on the intellectual, political, and cultural heritage of the West, and therefore of the United States, because it was an "education for an informed responsible life in our society." Thus the Redbook authors proposed, for example, that all students take a course called "Great Texts of Literature" in which the books would be selected from a list of "Homer, one or two of the Greek tragedies, Plato, the Bible, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Tolstoy." Reading these authors and learning the "core" of knowledge that was considered the foundation of liberal arts education did not mean that a student would commit to memory a small collection of finely crafted theories that explained away the world. Knowing a "core" of knowledge meant knowing a core of issues and enduring questions that have persistently confronted men since Biblical times and the insights and understanding the great authors have provided which have structured Western civilization.

The Wilson task force, the faculty committee which considered curricular changes explicitly rejected this traditional conception while usurping the title "core curriculum" for its proposal. It wanted a "mandatory core curriculum based not on some theoretical division or hierarchical ordering of knowledge, but rather on 'distinctive ways of thinking that are identifiable and important.'" On many separate occasions both Dean Rosovsky and Dean Verba have re-emphasized their view that a curriculum cannot be based on a core of knowledge. A Core curriculum in their view is to insure that each educated college graduate has a core of "skills" or "habits of though" or "knowledge of approaches."

The entire structure of the Core and its very course offerings emphasized the importance of techniques. By making students choose eight courses from among the 100 core courses, the Harvard Faculty has institutionalized its unwillingness to decide what things are more fundamental and what less fundamental to a liberal arts education. Further, the approval of courses on such varied and narrow topics as "Monuments of Japan." "The Novel in East Asia." "The Great Rebellion: Britain 1640-1660," "The Civilization of South American Indians" "Empire of the Mongols," "The Development of the String Quartet" and others in the same vein does not provide students with a common basis for intellectual discourse or an understanding of the influences on their lives in 20th-century America. While these courses may cover important subjects and while they may be enlightening, are they--to us Dean Rosovsky's language-"fundamental to undergraduate education?" In fact, most Harvard students taking Core courses are no more likely to have read and seriously understood the philosophical, political, or cultural foundations of their own United States than if they selected 32 random courses from the catalogue. The Core teachers students the intellectual habits and techniques of a scholar devoted to specialized inquiry not understanding of his or her polity, society, or self.

Why do Dean Rosovsky and the Harvard Faculty think that the Core of a liberal education is learning techniques? It is precisely techniques, methods of inquiry, habit of thought that define academic disciplines and disciplines define university departments. By giving students a core of techniques, the "core" curriculum is introducing them to the methods of the departmental scholar, not providing a liberal education. The Harvard Core has not wrestled general education away from the influence of specialized disciplines, which Dean Rosovsky warned would make a long-term commitment to general education "much more difficult." In fact the Core has simply re-defined liberal arts education and a core curriculum to mean acquaintance with the methods of the various academic disciplines From "Principles of Economics" to "Sources of Indian Civilization" to "Sub-Saharan African Civilizations" to "Politics. Mythology and Art in Bronze Age China" the Core curriculum offerings read more like a mini-smorgasboard of the more extensive departmental offerings than a coherent view of "articulate educational priorities." Far from liberating students, such a curriculum makes them selves of the techniques for narrow academic study.

To put it succinctly: The Harvard "core" curriculum is no curriculum at all. As a neighboring liberal arts institution 1947 curricular reform report put it: "It is the function of a liberal college to require at least an intelligent consideration of a few of the fields of knowledge which the college, by the fact of its teaching them, has market as significant." Such marking requires that the Faculty define a hierarchy, establish educational priorities, make a judgement on what is fundamentally important for an educated American and what is secondary or important for the specialized scholar. The Harvard Faculty finds doing this "in-appropriate." And so it has left the decisions of what is at the core of being educated to the students--in their selection of courses--and to the specialized scholars of its academic departments who design and teach Core courses.

Does this arrangement cause Dean Rosovsky less to worry whether Harvard graduates are educated? Does the Core curriculum as it is presently conceived fulfill Dean Rosovsky's two objectives for a liberal arts curriculum? Unfortunately. Harvard's Core curriculum has betrayed liberal arts education transforming it into technical training. The Core leaves students masters of scholarly techniques and habits but devoid of the spirit for intellectual inquiry into their human condition. Only by re-instituting a real "core" curriculum--against powerful departmental interests--can liberal education become a reality at Harvard again.