“I have not found it particularly enjoyable teaching in the Core this time around,” says Pilbeam, who recently ended a 15-year hiatus from teaching in the Core. “There has been a shifting of attitudes.”

Many of those supporting the current efforts see the same potential for change as emerged 30 years ago.

“It was [former Dean of the Faculty Henry A.] Rosovky’s vision to find ways to engage the Faculty,” Tartar says. “We needed an institutional change...I wouldn’t be surprised at all to see a dramatic change [again].”

Common Roots

What Dominguez cites as the potential for “a new educational adventure” is only one comparison between this review and the one in 1974 resulting in the Core.

According to legend, the 1974 review began when then-President Derek C. Bok asked Rosovsky what is meant by the president’s welcoming of the graduating class into the “company of educated men” every Commencement.

The result was a multi-year review of the entire College’s curriculum, conceived by a 10-page letter Rosovsky sent to the Faculty in 1974. That letter has since stood as a treatise on undergraduate education.

Citing “vast changes in advanced research in the past few decades” and the “formalistic” distinction between general education and the concentrations, Rosovky called for a major effort to ensure that “the people who intellectually sustain Harvard College...believe in its importance.”

Pilbeam says numerous similarities exist between that letter and one issued by Dean of the Faculty William C. Kirby last month.

“Rosovsky’s letter could be sent out with the date changed,” Pilbeam says.

Justifying the review in the name of “interconnected worlds of scholarship and teaching,” Kirby’s letter states that “what is true when Dean Rosovsky wrote to the Faculty in 1974 is no less true today.”

But while the Core was the answer to the problems with undergraduate education three decades ago, many say it is not the clear solution for this generation.

“I think that the Core is a good design for Harvard University. It answers questions better than alternative ideas, but I wouldn’t be very happy if we were not asking these basic questions,” Dominguez says.

Tinkering Around

Little precedence exists for enacting as great a change as some are predicting.