Yale and Princeton recently restructured their distribution requirements. Princeton, whose system now includes a focus on “ways of knowing,” has considered interdisciplinary studies and has discussed options for facilitating first-years’ transition into college life, Dobin says.

At Stanford, the seminar program for first-years and sophomores has also been a recent topic for review, Bravman says.

FOR HARVARD’S EYES ONLY

Harvard administrators say that creating a curriculum which serves as a model for other schools is not a priority.

“The curricular review is a statement we are first making about our own institution,” says Dean of the College Benedict H. Gross ’71.

“What [its influence] on American education will be remains to be seen,” Gross says. “Trying to design a curriculum for Harvard College is easier than trying to design one for all the colleges in the country.”

But Kirby says he does expect other schools to follow Harvard’s lead.

“On the one hand, our mission is not to reform the world, but to figure out the best way to educate our students,” Kirby says.

“Yet at the same time we know full well that we have a responsibility that goes beyond the Yard. Harvard, as a leading American institution, has an enormous responsibility to educate its students to be citizens of the world,” he says.

Vendler suggests that, regardless of the curricular review’s impact on higher education as a whole, it is the students who will determine the success of Harvard’s new program.

“Many versions of general education have been prominent: Harvard’s General Education was in its time; the Core curriculum also; Columbia’s two-year mandatory program in the Western tradition; the University of Chicago’s Great Books curriculum in its time. All you can say is that these schools produced both well-trained and ill-trained students,” says Vendler.

“The success seems to depend more upon the individual student. Any one program seems to have produced desirable students and less desirable ones,” she says.

Laurans writes in an e-mail that, regardless of Harvard’s particular curriculum, the school offers its students a tremendous array of opportunities.

“I have always thought that those who make the most of Harvard are those who have the capacity for the best kind of independence,” Laurans writes. “The amazing thing about a great university...is the more you get to know it the bigger it gets. There are worlds within worlds. Those who reach out to them learn and grow the most. This has nothing to do with curriculum.”

—Staff writer Sara E. Polsky can be reached at polsky@fas.harvard.edu.