Like fashion, education is subject to frequent trendy shifts in style. Hemlines go up and environmental studies comes in. Spiked heels disappear, and so do foreign language requirements. And like any other fashion-conscious group, educational institutions imitate each other for fear of seeming behind the times. Of course, each institution is careful to retain enough individuality to keep from sinking into a sea of polyester clones. To find out what is currently chic, the fashionable keep their eyes on the trendsetters; in this way, Halston and Harvard have a common function.

Periodically fashion and education grow nostalgic, and try to return to the way things were in the good old days. Harvard's new Core Curriculum, for example, harkens back to the narrower educational requirements of the early 1900s. The Core is part of a current national trend toward revising general education curricula, usually by tightening requirements and clarifying academic goals. But despite the impression fostered by the national media, Harvard's own administrators point out that the Core is neither the first nor the most radical educational reform of its kind. Many other institutions have almost simultaneously opted for programs like the Core in letter or in spirit.

Most experts agree that the current national flurry of general education reforms marks a swing of the pendulum back to the way curricula were before '60's campus activists forced many university administrations to abolish or loosen course requirements. Now that campuses are quiet again, faculties are starting to regret their loss of control over students' educations. Many of the reasons cited for curricular reforms sound like the same ones the fathers of general education offered in the early 1900s at places like Columbia, the University of Chicago, and Harvard. The speeches are so much alike they prompted critic Alston Chase to write in September's Atlantic Monthly that with the Core, Harvard is only "reinventing the wheel." Chase warns that the rest of the educational world may blindly follow suit without trying anything more innovative.

Modern general education saw its real start in 1919 when the Columbia College faculty instituted a required course in Contemporary Civilization, sometimes referred to by current students as "philosopher of the week." Robert Maynard Hutchins, president of the University of Chicago from 1929 into the '50s, started a more ambitious program, a four-year, totally prescribed, liberal arts curriculum to fight what he once called "the peculiar brutality and aggressive stupidity with which a man comports himself when he knows a great deal about one thing and is totally ignorant of the rest." Like Columbia, Chicago wanted its students to share a common intellectual experience and hoped to insure a familiarity with basic literary and historical accomplishment.

Although Harvard's General Education in a Free Society recommended in 1945 that Harvard prescribe specific courses in western thought, literature and science for all students, the Faculty opted instead for a selection of courses in Natural Sciences, Social Sciences and the Humanities. Many other institutions imitated this system, although few devised specific general education courses, preferring instead to let students fulfill the distribution requirement with departmental offerings.

Educators at U.S. institutions that have just changed or are now changing their general education programs, say that over the years the purpose of general education requirements has been lost through options and exemptions for students and lack of guidelines about liberal education for faculties. Rudolph Weingartner, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern University, says Northwestern's old four-area distribution requirement assured only that students would take whatever courses in the various departments fit their schedules, without any concern for fashioning a coherent education.

Columbia's old argument for a common base of knowledge also comes up in current discussions of general education. John Perry, chairman of the Philosophy Department at Stanford University and head of a committee instituting a new program there, says, "Since the end of the war, Stanford professors have had to water down their advanced courses to explain material they used to be able to assume students understood." David Riesman, Ford Professor of Social Sciences, adds that a common intellectual experience enables students to learn more from each other. Under Gen Ed, he says, "the chance is minimal that you will be taking a course that one of your roommates is taking so you can talk about it together."

Often a university will use curricular reforms to bolster a program facing destruction. In the early 1900's Columbia and Chicago were threatened with the possible dissolution of their undergraduate programs under pressure from educators who felt college-aged students should be learning specialties and hurrying out into the world to apply them, instead of dabbling in liberal arts with little practical use.

By coming up with solid and coherent general education programs, the two schools reasserted the importance of undergraduate liberal arts.

Similar pressures today generally take a financial form as colleges fold at an alarming rate. Riesman says financially weak schools often feel the need to differentiate themselves, if only slightly, from other schools in order to attract students. But change is risky because a school making the wrong choice may lose students and have to close. "If you get empty buildings, you wind up as a Holiday Inn," says Howard Solomon, dean of undergraduate studies and academic affairs at Tufts.

Restating educational goals also helps faculty morale by reuniting professors in a common purpose and encouraging development of new courses to meet the new standards.

Although the forces behind curricular reform are fairly universal, the specific solutions offered differ greatly. Most schools undergoing curricular change agree that requirements should be more demanding and the faculties should have more control over a student plan of study. But faculties differ over how many and which areas of study are important and in whether or not to require all students to take specific courses or to let them choose from a selection. Universities also sometimes lack people qualified to teach the courses they want to offer.

Outside help is available, however. Northwestern, Syracuse and Johns Hopkins have all recently won large grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to hire faculty and develop programs for their general education experiments. A Mellon spokesman says the foundation has no set policy of helping curriculum experiments, but considers aiding institutions that present strong educational plans.

Some schools are merely tightening their general education requirements without substantially altering their form. Berkeley's Letters and Sciences program will require the Class of '83 to fulfill a math requirement stressing logic and quantitative reasoning as well as a foreign language requirement. The school, which already requires American history and American institutions courses, is also modifying its Nat Sci, Soc Sci, Hum distribution requirement to make students take courses in both areas outside of their major.

The widespread return of basic skills requirements like math, languages and writing, prompts some observers to say colleges are moving "back to basics." Roderic B. Park '53, dean and provost of the College of Letters and Sciences at Berkeley, says educators dislike the term "back to basics" because "it implies that you have joined a movement of dinosaurs who don't have modern liberal education in mind. It's a movement that extends from good intentions to some very conservative ideas." Nevertheless, with high schools providing increasingly uneven preparation, college faculties are realizing they must teach students "with the short attention span of television instead of the long attention span of Tolstoy," says Riesman.