Lawrence Buell, dean of undergraduate education and chair of the Committee on Non-Departmental Instruction, says present General Education courses are those that "don't fall into departmental categories without prerequisities."
"Sort of an all-comers kind of course," Buell says. "This is sharply different from the old General Education, which was an integral part of the distribution system."
Since 1979, general education electives have evolved into offbeat courses that professors enjoy teaching.
The curriculum includes titles such as Gen Ed 103, "AIDS, Health and Human Rights"; Gen Ed 136, "Explaining the Holocaust and the Phenomenon of Genocide"; Adams 122, "Printed Books as a Field of Study"; and Quincy 121, "A History of Zoos."
Oettinger says the hodgepodge of classes makes for "strange bedfellows."
"It is no longer a coherent sampling across [academic areas] as it used to be," Oettinger says. "The coherence is that they're non-departmental."
Focused Electives
The 1946 Committee on General Education earmarked spots in all of its new courses for first-years and sophomores, with the hopes of adding advanced classes for juniors and seniors by 1949.
Two-fifths of all seats were reserved for incoming first-years, and another two-fifths were set aside for sophomores.
The remaining one-fifth were reserved for women attending Radcliffe.
A total of 410 students were allowed in the classes the first year they were offered, and students were required to fill out applications for consideration.
But because today's General Education classes count for neither concentration nor distribution credit, enrollment is open to all undergraduates.
Most professors and enrollees have a genuine interest in the subject, according to Oettinger, who says such a bond is the best part about the program.
"I've never had any student in my course who didn't want to be there," says Oettinger, who teaches Gen Ed 156, "The Information Age, Its Main Currents and Their Intermingling."
Usually about four General Education lectures, 10 house seminars and 40 freshman seminars are offered each year.
Lotteries are usually held for the seminars, since many students seek the chance to learn from professors in small-group settings.
Lectures, with their unlimited enrollment capacity, typically draw large crowds, too. About 800 students take Coles' class.
Buell says the fact the students take the courses despite their lack of concentration or distributional credit demonstrates their importance.
"Students [who] take these courses consider them a valuable enhancement to a Harvard education even if they aren't central to a course-of-study plan," Buell says. "It's not a large curriculum, but it seems to me it fills a significant need."