It would be naive to suggest that the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) could make some policy decisions that would transform overnight our attitudes toward education.

Still, it could certainly do some things to help. Departments should tenure junior professors who like to teach and who are good at it. (That this obvious point still needs to be made is incredible.)

Departments should hire women scholars, minority scholars and scholars whose work questions rather than rein-forces the conventions of their discipline.

I don't want to blindly attack old white men. I plan to be one myself some day. The point is that different voices are absolutely necessary to bring school and life back together.

FAS cannot afford simply to rely on its individual departments, or even its individual members to be innovative. It must actively foster institutional innovation.

For example, instead of thinking about reforms of the Core curriculum in terms of its current discipline-oriented categories, FAS should look into creating a whole new sort of Core that focuses on issues such as gender, race and class--a curriculum that would consciously attempt to make a Harvard education into something that will serve us in the real world.

I don't mean something that would improve our position in the job market, but something that would serve us personally, politically, really.

Otherwise we're all wasting our time here. That's where cynicism comes from: when you realize the meaninglessness of what you do.