“I think everyone can agree that general education should provide some foundation in the basic principles of the major discipline or the major groups of disciplines. No one should get a bachelor’s degree without being familiar with the basic disciplines. But students should have a great degree of choice.”

But according to Frieden, despite changes, fundamental aspects of the Core will remain the same.

“You’ll probably recognize the Core if you come back in 10 years,” he says.

NARROWING THE FIELD

The new general education proposal will be presented to the Faculty at their May 4 meeting in a report authored by Associate Dean of the College Jeffrey Wolcowitz. Along with the rest of the review’s proposals, it will be debated by the Faculty this Spring and throughout next year, with a final vote likely a year from now.

Since Spring 2003, the Working Group on General Education has been considering a variety of curricular models.

The committee’s co-chair Eric N. Jacobsen told the Faculty in December that his committee had begun by evaluating four possible paradigms of general education: an open system, such as Brown University’s, a “Great Books” model such as Columbia’s, an open distribution requirement like that of Yale and a closed distribution requirement like the current Core curriculum.

Dozens of colleges and universities across the country employ a system of distributional requirements, whereby students must take a specified number of courses in designated academic areas. Yale, for example, which completed a curricular review in November 2003, will in the Fall require its students to take two courses in the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences and quantitative reasoning, as well as two writing-intensive courses.

In contrast, the Columbia core program, which was floated as an option for Harvard, demands that students take five specific classes, a number of courses in a foreign language and physical education, as well as science and non-Western cultures distribution requirements.

The open requirements system in place at Brown was the most flexible but also, according to Jacobsen, the only plan that was thrown out right in the beginning.

At Brown, students are allowed to forgo general education requirements entirely, and are trusted to build well-rounded curricula for themselves with few official guiding principles.

Before arriving at its current plan, Frieden says, the committee entertained any and all options.

“The sentiment of the working group has been very open,” Frieden said.

GETTING TO THE CORE

The Core in its current form reflects a determination on the part of Harvard’s administration to expose each of its students to different “approaches to knowledge.”