Bok adds that one important result of Harvard’s 1978 review was that it generated new enthusiasm for undergraduate education at a time when Harvard and other universities had been increasingly focused on research and on teaching graduate students.

“If a curricular review is handled well...what you can hope to get out of it is a sense of ownership on the part of the faculty,” Bok says.

“You always work more enthusiastically if you understand the curriculum,” he continues, referring to the energy that the 1978 review created among Faculty members.

In its recent curricular review, Yale considered adopting a Core curriculum similar to Harvard’s, though Yale eventually chose to revise its established system of distribution requirements.

Other aspects of Harvard’s curriculum have also served as a model for elite universities.

Princeton unveiled a first-year writing program three years ago similar to Harvard’s Expository Writing program, says Princeton’s Associate Dean of the College Hank Dobin.

REQUIRED TO REFORM

Administrators from schools nationwide say their institutions feel a regular pressure to reform.

“Curricular reform in higher education tends to come in waves, the timing of which is related to advances in knowledge, changing intellectual, social and moral interests and values,” Keller writes in an e-mail.

Dobin suggests that these pressures are felt particularly by elite schools.

“I would say that schools that are considered leading edge...feel a self-imposed obligation to lead the way. They want to reflect advances in knowledge in the curriculum,” Dobin says.

Stanford’s Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education John C. Bravman agrees that top schools have a responsibility to think about curricular reform.

“I think it’s incumbent upon any cutting edge institution to be constantly considering what we do, when there are things we can change,” Bravman says.

Porter University Professor Helen H. Vendler says she believes that the impulse to reform is an element of human nature.

“There’s some desire in human beings to redo everything in every generation—departments, general education programs, administrative organization....After 25 years one feels the need for change,” Vendler says.