But it was not until Conant became president that the College’s mission became social as well as academic.

At that time, Harvard students were no longer the prep-school gentlemen of Harvard’s earlier days. Raised during the Great Depression, many students came to Harvard after serving in the military and many came from middle-class homes, or were the children of blue-collar workers.

A Harvard education, Conant decided, could no longer be exclusively humanistic. Conant had a vision of a meritocratic university that would reflect the liberalization of American society and prepare its students to serve and understand that society. With this in mind, Conant set up a committee under then-University Provost Paul H. Buck to design a new curriculum.

Buck’s committee gathered information and advice and even performed a comprehensive survey of Radcliffe students and alumnae, taking into careful consideration the social changes brought about by the two world wars.

In 1945 that committee drafted General Education in a Free Society—commonly known as “the Redbook”—which suggested a curriculum of diverse courses in the humanities, social sciences and sciences. There were courses on the “Great Texts of Literature” as well as “History of Science.” Like Lowell’s system, students had to take six of their 16 undergraduate courses under the umbrella of general education, distributing these courses among the three divisions.

The plan for General Education, approved overwhelmingly by the Faculty—after seven debates—was implemented in the fall of 1946.

Like Lowell’s reforms 30 years earlier, the Redbook—which quickly became a bestseller—had a ripple effect on the nation’s universities, leading to widespread acceptance of the notion that the academic institution could be a vehicle for social egalitarianism.

The new program had several major effects, including a dramatic expansion in the number of classes offered to undergraduates. By 1947, departments offered two to three times as many courses as they had at the turn of the century.

The Gen Ed system also led to the slow decline of the tutorial system, as some concentrations decided to stop offering their small advanced courses for upperclassmen.

The next three decades brought great social change to the nation, and to Harvard—the constituency of the undergraduate population changed again as the College opened its doors to more minorities, women and children of the working class.

And as America erupted into the social chaos of the 1960s, the General Education program that had been a great breakthrough upon its introduction in 1946 proved insufficient, unable to cope with the changing demands of Harvard’s students.

General Education had become a broad, nebulous category of courses that could not be classified into departments: requirements were vague, students were unmotivated and professors were frustrated.

The social changes of the preceeding decades had rendered the curriculum tiresome and disfunctional.

The impetus for reform came from then-Dean of the Faculty Henry A. Rosovsky.

In 1973, he organized a committee of six faculty members and two students, headed by government professor James Q. Wilson, that deliberated, researched and fielded advice from professors for several years.