“One must be very careful not to incentivize that which should be a normal part of life at a university,” Bravman says.

Boyer affirms that the full support of members of an institution is required for a curricular review to be put in place.

“A curriculum has to be a medium- to long-term commitment,” Boyer says. “You can’t change the curriculum every year, so there has be some kind of steadiness.”

INNOVATION AND IMITATION?

Though Harvard’s current review requires a great deal of commitment and resources, administrators nationwide and Harvard professors say they are not expecting much innovation.

Indeed, some of the proposals that will go before the Faculty this May, such as moving away from the Core and pushing concentration choice to a later time, seem to align Harvard with its peers, not set it apart.

Steven J. Gortler, Goldman Professor of Computer Science and director of undergraduate studies in computer science, says he does not believe the changes implemented by the curricular reform will be a drastic departure from Harvard’s current system of undergraduate education.

“I don’t think it’s going to be radically different from what we have now. There will be some changes, but I don’t think it will be earth-shattering,” he says.

Professor of Biological Anthropology Daniel E. Lieberman holds similar expectations about the review.

“My sense is that this review is more of an effort to tinker or modernize rather than to revolutionize,” Lieberman writes in an e-mail.

Because these changes are not expected to be groundbreaking, administrators at other schools say they do not plan to follow in Harvard’s footsteps.

Dobin says he recently attended a conference of Ivy League, Stanford, Chicago and MIT academic deans where he listened to a presentation about Harvard’s curricular review.

“[Whether it has an impact] depends entirely on how innovative or radical the change is. I would be surprised if anything very radical were to come out of it,” Dobin says.

Boyer agrees that he does not expect Harvard’s review to have much of an impact on the world of higher education.

In fact, many of the topics under consideration in Harvard’s current curricular review have already been addressed recently by review committees at other schools.