Futurology 5

The liberal-arts education has taken on a queer form indeed at Harvard College. A student may arrive here from Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Fairfax County, Va.—among the best secondary schools in the nation—ready to study mathematics. He ambitiously prepares a plan of study that allows him to earn an honors degree, a foreign language citation, and a Phi Beta Kappa key, all before his 22nd birthday.

While taking rather seriously the selection of his departmental courses and high-powered economics and statistics electives—the recruiters at D. E. Shaw & Co. are to be duly impressed—our young hero applies an entirely different set of criteria when it comes to fulfilling his General Education (The Curriculum Formerly Known as Core) requirements. Rather than “What will I learn?,” he asks himself, “When will I wake up to go to class?” After then cross-referencing those options with his now-only-digital Q Guide, with an eye toward maximizing his grade point average, he settles on Japan Pop: From Basho to Banana as his first step toward the laudable goal of a liberal education. Over the next four years, he will also sign up for The World in 1776, The Images of Alexander the Great, Revolution and Reaction: The Rise and Fall of the Russian Avant-Garde, Confucian Humanism: Self-Cultivation and Moral Community, and Dinosaurs and Their Relatives. These courses, claim the venerable Harvard College administrators, will liberalize an otherwise parochial course load.

This regime of miscellany—motley enough to impress Ben Schott—will, according to the College, “connect [the student’s] liberal education—that is, an education conducted in a spirit of free inquiry, rewarding in its own right—to life beyond college.” The hapless freshman, who trusted the so very many rankings and social signals that assured him there was no place like Harvard for a liberal education, has been badly shortchanged. While he will have spent $3,000 on books for his classes, he will not have bought a single work of William Shakespeare or Henry James. He will be wholly unfamiliar with John Stuart Mill or Bertrand Russell. Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus might as well be Plato or Aristotle—that is to say, Greek. This newspaper reported last Thursday that Dean of Undergraduate Education Jay Harris informed an ad hoc committee deliberating the addition of a Great Books element to the new Program for General Education that the plan was on hold due to the financial crisis.

Deeply troubling and extremely questionable, this recent development suggests that the administration is not at all serious about rethinking what ought to constitute a liberal education. The Program for General Education, finalized nearly two years ago, is a comically slight permutation of the Core Curriculum: Quantitative Reasoning becomes Empirical and Mathematical Reasoning, Moral Reasoning becomes Ethical Reasoning, Foreign Cultures becomes Societies of the World, and so on. It is insulting that ostensibly the most intellectually rigorous body in academia (the Faculty of Arts and Sciences) thought the Harvard community—so well trained by the old Core in “ways of knowing”—could be so easily hoodwinked. The college squandered its one chance in a generation to modernize Harvard’s undergraduate education.

Gen Ed’s only hope for salvation lies in rationalizing the concept of required courses or fields of study by admitting that there exists a canon and that it is worth knowing. The administration’s decision to frustrate efforts to incorporate Great Books into the undergraduate curriculum suggests that the school has decided against changing the Core in any meaningful way. Dispirited, the ad hoc committee that was considering the issue, led by forward-thinking Professors David Armitage and Marjorie Garber, will no longer even meet. By framing the debate around Gen Ed in fundamentally semantic terms (look above at the main fruits of a ponderously lengthy curricular review!), the faculty has forfeited the right to be taken seriously as teachers. Considering the quantum of scholarship devoted to debating what is and is not canonical, it is shocking that these selfsame scholars refuse to arm all young undergraduates with knowledge this canon.

Nick Carraway explains in The Great Gatsby—which I read because my high school and the writers of the Advanced Placement English Literature and Composition test luckily did believe in Great Books—that he is going to take up a heavy reading schedule so that he can become “that most limited of all specialists, the ‘well-rounded man.’” It is embarrassing that Harvard believes a medley of irrelevancies will prepare students for “life beyond college,” and even more embarrassing that the financial crisis is used as an excuse to stop investigating the serious idea that Great Books have a place in undergraduate education. Nothing less than the future of Harvard’s status as the premier provider of a liberal education is at stake, and this writer, on the occasion of his last column of the year, hopes that the administration will undo its decision with haste.


Kiran R. Pendri ’11 is a chemical and physical biology concentrator in Lowell House. His column appears on alternate Mondays.