Why higher education is neither - includes related article

Washington Monthly, Oct, 1989 by Jason DeParle, Liza Mundy, John Heilemann

By the 1960s, however, such demands fell into disrepute, and the enthusiasm for "relevance" arose. New academic fashions sprang up everywhere--Afro-American studies, women's studies, folklore and mythology--and each faction demanded that its courses, too, should satisfy the General Education requirement. Harvard's General Education Committee decided, in its words, to "let a thousand flowers bloom," and the pollen soon filled the air. The number of General Education courses exploded from 37 in 1964 to 120 in 1978, and included such basics in any undergraduate's repertoire as "The Making of Australia," "The role of Women in Irish Society," and "The Classical Music of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh." Similar changes took place across the country; Brown went even farther--abolishing all requirements outside the major.

Recognizing the incoherence of its program, Harvard in the mid-seventies again sought to institute a core curriculum. What it got--and what remains--is a program that William Bennett calls Core Lite, a fake core that, in fact, is just another set of distribution requirements. The parents who peruse their daughter's 1989 Introduction to the Core Curriculum will see it grandly touted as "an attempt to say what it means to be broadly educated today. . .an introduction to the requirements for a vigorous life of the mind." Editors at The Harvard Crimson know better. "The Core sure won't give you a coherent picture about Western history, scientific advances, or philosophical thought...." the recently warned students, "you could graduate from Harvard without ever having read Shakespeare, understood Newton, or thought about Plato."

The reasons for the reform's unraveling were familiar: the faculty fought tooth-and-nail against a plan that would require ambitious interdisciplinary teaching; rival departments engaged in pork-barrel politics to ensure that their own favorite offerings were included in the mix. Thus by 1988 the "Core" had bloated out to include 145 courses in 10 different distribution areas.

Gut glut

The problems with this system are familiar. One, there's the gut. Here's how the Crimson editors describe "Thought and Change in the Contemporary Middle East," which satisfies the core's foreign cultures requirement: "[Professor Nur] Yalman greeted the masses with a morsel of his winning wit: 'I know you're all here just because there's no final exam." Most professors recoil at the thought of teaching a course rumored to be an amazing gut. The magic in this case is that Nur wallows in it."

Two, there's the potentially tough, but narrow, offerings that, taken together, comprise not a core but a sliver. A Harvard student can satisfy the three Literature and Arts requirements with the following: "Beast Literature," "Monuments of Japan," and "The Celtic Heroic Age." Ah--so that's what it "means to be broadly educated today"!

Realizing that someone might catch on, Harvard built in an answer: the core seeks to convey not specific material but only "major approaches to knowledge...what kind of knowledge and what forms of inquiry exist...how they are used, what their value is"--everything, that is, but the knowledge itself. The high-brow elaboration of this decision goes something like this: alas, in today's rapidly changing society, any body of knowledge is both unfathomably large and subject to becoming quickly outdated; therefore, what's important is to teach people how to think. Sounds profound--but why can't a student's major approaches to knowledge" be honed on Dante as easily as on "Beast Literature"? The blunt explanation: the system of faculty privilege triumphed again.