“I would be very sorry if we were simply in the tweaking business,” Dominguez says.

Resurrected Alternatives

While the mandate from the dean may be different, the Faculty seems as divided as it was in 1974.

According to Dominguez, the widely ranging faculty opinions resulted in the victory of the Core by only a two-to-one ratio. Today, the Faculty typically approves legislation unanimously.

And Dominguez says the opposition to the Core will never completely disappear.

“Most of the people who are critics of the Core are critics on principle,” he says.

These critics have begun to surface again.

One group of faculty has always rallied around the “Great Books” alternative used by Columbia and the University of Chicago. An amendment to the original Core legislation was proposed to require a course on the great works of Western Civilization, but the proposal was defeated.

And even now, those who consider themselves the strongest advocates for this option say that it is not in the offing.

“It doesn’t work for Harvard—it won’t happen and I am not interested in pushing it,” says Wolfson Professor of Jewish Studies Jay M. Harris, who has taught in Columbia’s Great Books program.

Harris says he thinks students would be opposed to the program’s graduate student instruction. The necessity of removing faculty from their area of expertise he says is another flaw of the system.

“We have world class experts here in certain fields—why should they teach something else,” he says.

But while the majority agree that instruction should not be confined to a few authors, they are left wondering how exactly it should be divided.

“It is not clear that knowledge is divided into 11 [Core] subsections,” Gross says. “There is not much intellectual justification for that.”

Recognizing these arbitrary distinctions, numerous professors continue to support a system of distribution requirements mandating students take a certain number of classes within a few broad fields. Such a system is widely used by other colleges, including Yale.