“The general education committee has the toughest job in a sense. It’s not as easy as saying, ‘Here is a specific problem and here is a technical solution,’” says former Undergraduate Council President Matthew W. Mahan ’05, a member of the committee, who wrote his senior thesis on the curricular review process. “[The committee] was charged with creating a soul for the curriculum.”

NO LACK OF IDEAS

Working from the idea that the Core Curriculum would be eliminated, committee members eventually began to consider course requirements that could suitably replace it.

“We all thought about courses that might be worth teaching,” says Maier. “We were writing [proposals] all the time.”

According to the committee’s internal documents and members of the committee, Pinker proposed a sequence of courses that would teach non-science concentrators about life sciences, physical sciences, and ideas of logic and probability. Committee member Louis Menand, the Bass Professor of English and American Literature and Language, suggested a one-year course based on the great works of Western literature.

The committee’s two student representatives, Mahan and Nicholas F. M. Josefowitz ’05, submitted a three-page proposal in which they argued that “Harvard College Courses should stand as the central component of general education.” Their plan would have required students to take Harvard College Courses in a number of focused areas: significant works of literature, analytical and hermeneutic social sciences, biological and physical sciences, as well as ethics and citizenship.

While Mahan and Josefowitz called for Harvard College Courses that would be focused within particular academic divisions, another proposal suggested that Harvard College Courses draw from disparate disciplines in the analysis of specific topics. This proposal, written by Watts Professor of Music and Professor of African and African American Studies Kay K. Shelemay and Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and of Comparative Literature Diana Sorensen, set forth a number of ideas for specific Harvard College Courses, such as “Great River Systems,” a course that would examine the ecology, history, and culture of rivers such as the Mississippi. They also proposed courses with titles such as “Cities and Exchanges,” “Uncertainty,” and “Illness, Health, and Healing.”

Committee members say there was extensive discussion and debate on the various proposals at weekly meetings, but little agreement. Some members criticized Pinker’s proposal for being too restrictive, while others thought that Shelemay and Sorensen’s proposal left too much flexibility in Harvard College Courses.

A TIME FOR CONSENSUS

As the committee entered 2005, Kirby called for members to begin working towards agreement in order to have a report ready for presentation to the Faculty in the spring. One schedule from this period, included in the committee’s internal documents, listed a Feb. 4 deadline for curricular review committees to have completed their reports.

As chair of the committee, Kirby faced the difficult task of uniting committee members with drastically different views on the theory of general education.

“The job of a chair of a committee of such talented people is to give multiple points of view the chance to be aired, to work towards agreements, to be frank where there are areas of disagreement, and to work towards consensus on the part of colleagues,” Kirby says.

The committee moved away from a “one size fits all” stance on general education—requiring all students to follow a largely predetermined path—to a greater emphasis on choice. The extent and array of choices, however, remained a divisive topic as the report’s deadline approached.

Mahan suggests that Kirby may not have done enough to forge agreement on the contentious issues of the review such as the nature of Harvard College Courses and the amount of responsibility that should be placed on students to choose their own curriculum.

“I very much enjoyed hearing what the committee members had to say, but I was frustrated with the fact that we were never forced to agree on more substantive principles than choice, which seemed to be the fall-back position,” he says. “Though it wouldn’t have been easy, I think Dean Kirby could have done more to push us to make tough decisions.”