University President Lawrence H. Summers laid out his vision for a new undergraduate curriculum in the greatest detail to date in a Commencement afternoon speech that spanned more than half an hour.

Summers outlined the general problems an ongoing curricular review must remedy, pointing in particular to the perennial issue of advising, engagement in the curriculum and the inadequacy of science education for non-science concentrators.

And though Summers acknowledged that Dean of the Faculty William C. Kirby and Dean of Undergraduate Education Benedict H. Gross ’71 bear responsibility for conducting the review, he offered specific priorities of his own, ranging from a call to provide students with “familiarity with the landscape of the major fields of knowledge” to the need for a greater emphasis on oratorical skills.

In remarks delivered before former Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo’s keynote address, Summers told the approximately 5,000 in attendance that the current curricular review will be similar to Harvard’s previous attempts to define the Harvard education—having far-reaching implications “not just for the University, but for higher education and for our country and our world.”

Though Summers has used such lofty rhetoric in the past, the specifics of his speech represent the first time he has committed to changes more groundbreaking than adjustments to the current Core Curriculum or academic calendar.

In his speech, Summers said Harvard begins “from a position of great strength,” but noted that much had changed since the last time the curriculum had undergone a systematic review, 25 years ago.

He said he was moved and troubled by a report of the lack of direct engagement between senior Faculty and undergraduate students, citing the case of one science concentrator who, sharing his thoughts regarding curricular review, said that not one senior professor knew him by name.

He spoke of “a yearning that I heard from many students in my visits into the Houses—a yearning that I did not expect—for greater guidance from our remarkable faculty with respect to what it was that is most important for them to know in broad areas of knowledge.”

This comment not only highlighted the great dissatisfaction among students with the advising system—a problem that Gross and others have said will receive very close attention in the curricular review—but also signaled a potential shift in curricular emphasis toward bodies of knowledge that students would have to be able to command. An attention to teaching “ways of thinking,” rather than discrete knowledge, has served as the bedrock of the Core since its adoption.

Summers said that when he told a Harvard art historian about his wish for a survey course “as an introduction for students who would probably never take another art history course in their lives,” she reacted “with a mixture of consternation and hilarity,” arguing that no “self-respecting” scholar could teach all of art history in one year.

“In this age of exploding and highly specialized knowledge, and justified skepticism about Olympian claims, it is not easy to figure out how we can legitimately address our students’ desire for familiarity with the landscape of the major fields of knowledge,” Summers said. “But I hope we will do our best to wrestle with this issue.”

There are certain fundamentals that students should not be able to leave Harvard without, Summers said, including the ability to write an expository essay, interpret “great humanistic texts” and “connect history to the present.”

In this vein, Summers encouraged a deeper understanding of the sciences, echoing a theme that has recurred throughout his presidency. 

“All our students should understand at some basic level how unraveling the mysteries of the genome is transforming the nature of science,” he said, “and how empirical methods can sharpen our analysis of complex problems facing the world.”

In an analogy that won laughs from the audience, Summers likened educated people’s relationship to science to that with the engine of a car: “They appreciate its importance, they understand what it can do for them and they recognize the needs for experts to make or repair it. But they have fundamentally not a clue about what goes on under the hood.”