First in an occasional series on the Harvard Core Curriculum. Concluding its tenth year, the Core faces administrative review in a context of national debate over academic philosophy, and within inherent limits on undergraduate education set by a research-oriented faculty.

The incoming Class of 1993 was only seven-years-old when an era of 1960s-inspired liberal--some say anarchic--education came to an end at Harvard.

Now, 10 years later, the outcome of that conservative swing in the pendulum will be reviewed as Harvard's celebrated Core Curriculum undergoes a faculty and administrative review. While not expected to call for broad revision or fundamental change, the assessment will represent Harvard's latest statement on what makes an "educated person."

Administrators will study whether the Core courses--specifically tailored to fit a 1978 plan for providing a sound undergraduate education--succeed in teaching "modes of knowledge" and analysis of varying disciplines. But the review takes place amid continuing debate over the Core's fundamental premise of basing education on the "approaches to thinking" in a loose ordering of disciplines.

And having taken a stand opposed to critics on the academic right, who call for greater educational structure, and to those on the left, who call for more freedom, the Core still faces the question of whether it fulfills its own promises to students pursuing a Harvard diploma.

President-Elect Bok Holds a Meeting

Harvard's first formal review of undergraduate education since 1945 began in 1971 with a quiet meeting between then President-elect Bok and then-Professor of Economics Henry Rosovsky. Two years later, Rosovsky took over as Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) with a mandate for curricular reform.

His solution appeared in 1978 in a plan hoped to counteract the damaging laissez-faire legacy of the 1960s. A Harvard curriculum liberated by a decade of student unrest--following a trend that had swept colleges from coast to coast--had become by the mid-1970s incoherent and "soft", offering courses such as "the aesthetics of film comedy" and "the civilization of continental and island Portugal" to fulfill humanities requirements, according to a contemporary article in the Saturday Review.

The Core Program, heir to the World War II-era General Education requirement, was implemented after years of planning and deliberation to re-form the centerpiece of Harvard undergraduate education along more structured lines.

Replacing the 10-odd Gen Ed course requirements split between the humanities, social sciences and natural sciences, the Core introduced the notion of teaching "approaches to knowledge" in more specific areas including foreign studies, the arts, and "social and philosophical" reasoning. The Core's philosophy has been translated by administrators to mean non-departmental courses focusing not so much on facts as analysis, not so much on teaching a distribution requirement as teaching a "form of inquiry."

No longer would a Harvard graduate, it was reasoned, earn his or her diploma without encountering the reasoning--if not the works--of thinkers such as Plato and Shakespeare, Newton and Picasso, Bolivar and Machiavelli.

Showing Signs of Age

But in 1989, many believe the Core has not completely met its broad educational aims. A frequent target for criticism is the Core's science content. In an otherwise rosy accreditation review last year, the New England Association of Schools and Colleges found Harvard's Quantitative Reasoning Requirement (QRR) superficial and criticized the absence of math in the Core.

"There is a general feeling that as we move into the twenty-first century, future citizens should know more science than the Core demands," says Dean of the Division of Applied Sciences (DAS) Paul C. Martin '52.

Currently, two courses in science are required by the Core. Students with adequate high school records may petition to drop one of these.