"You do hear discussions about the effects of affirmative action, you do hear discussions about what happens in other universities and what happens in speech codes, but I have not attended any hand-waving or heart-wrenching discussions about the canon," Hoffmann says.

Jones Professor of Classical Greek Literature and Professor of Comparative Literature Gregory Nagy suggest that Harvard professors use the word" canon" as a catchphrase because they no longer debate or discuss what the content of a liberal arts education should be.

We've lost the knack to think about liberal education on a daily basis," Nagy says, referring to "the obsolescence of the usage of 'liberal education' as a term."

But Stansfield Professor of International Peace Robert O. Keohane attributes this silence to Harvard's status as a large research institution.

"I think it's a feature of a major university," Keohane says. "When I was on a small college faculty, we talked about it all the time. In a big university, the division of labor sets in and there are core committees."

"As long as one think as I do, that the curriculum seems to be in good shape," that division of labor is not bothersome, Keohane says.

Timeless Texts

A few professors still think, however, that despite the lack of consensus on what Harvard graduates should know, there is still a group of texts essential for an undergraduate education.

"I don't think it's difficult to design a list of 20, 30, 40 books. I certainly would have no problem," Baird Professor of History Richard Pipes says. "There are books that have made a very major impact on Western thinking: Locke's two books on human understanding and government, Rousseau's Social Contract, Mills On Liberty, Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics...and the Bible," to name a few.

Most faculty members interviewed, however, were reluctant to come up with such a list. And even those who did endorse certain works said they did not want to force students to read them.

"I don't believe in forcing students into a straitjacket," Keohane says. "If someone wants to get through Harvard without ever reading Shakespeare or knowing what the French Revolution was, I suppose they could do it, but that would be foolish."

Requiring courses might make students resent what they learn though they may appreciate it later, one English professor says.

"You learn when you teach required course that there is always a trade-off," says Porter University Professor Helen H. Vendler. "I personally feel sorry for people who are going to die without reading a poem by Horace or play by Aeschylus, but that's up to them."

Most professor say they are confident in Harvard students' ability to discern what they should know and to seek it out for themselves.

"I think there has been a sense--this may be a slightly romantic view of my colleagues--that Harvard students are on the whole sensible enough and bright enough to be able to pick through the very considerable range of offering which they have," says Williams Professor of History and political Science Roderick MacFarquhar.