If the Core survives Harvard’s three-year-old curricular review, the
story of the effort to redefine undergraduate education here might one
day be reading material for the Literature and Arts-A course, ”Tragic
Drama and Human Conflict.”
With the review’s Educational Policy Committee (EPC) report
just weeks away from full Faculty vetting earlier this month,
engineering professors raised serious concerns about the report’s chief
recommendations.
Then, the resurgence of tensions between University President
Lawrence H. Summers and his Faculty critics once again diverted
professors’ attention away from the curricular review.
Now, the EPC and Dean of the College Benedict H. Gross ’71 are
looking for ways to revise the review’s recommendations that will
satisfy natural and applied science professors.
Gross met professors from the Division of Engineering and
Applied Sciences (DEAS) Tuesday, less than two weeks after the DEAS
faculty voted to approve a series of statements criticizing key
curricular review recommendations.
The meeting with Gross was “very cordial and constructive,”
according to one attendee, Steven C. Wofsy, the Rotch professor of
atmospheric and environmental science and a DEAS member.
Wofsy and other DEAS members still have some concerns about
the curricular review’s plan to push concentration choice back to the
middle of sophomore year, though Wofsy said the dean was “very
receptive to the ideas we put forward.”
Members of the physics department expressed similar concerns
about the concentration-choice delay at a Monday meeting, according to
the department’s chair, John Huth.
These professors value the fact that the current system, which
requires students to choose their concentration at the end of freshman
year, places undergraduates in contact with departmental advisers early
in their academic careers.
They worry that a delay in concentration choice without an
improvement in pre-concentration advising might mean that science
concentrators don’t take key prerequisite courses early enough.
Professors have proposed at least two solutions to this potential flaw in the concentration-choice delay.
First, physicist Gary J. Feldman, the Baird professor of
science, suggested that science students could declare their
concentrations at an earlier point in their undergraduate careers than
their peers in the humanities and the social sciences.
Yale University already maintains a similar system. Sophomores
interested in science majors are told to have their course schedules
approved by a science department adviser, according to an official Yale
website. Non-science students don’t have to declare their major until
the beginning of junior year, according to the website.
Second, Professor of Economics David I. Laibson ’88, an EPC member, said, “the key in all of this is the advising system.”
“If you’re to get an engineering degree, you can’t leave it to sophomore year,” Laibson said.
Currently, many freshmen rely on their residential-hall proctors for pre-concentration advising.
“The really big problem in our advising system is that there
are a lot of proctors who are advising people outside of the proctor’s
area of specialty,” Laibson said.
He added that the EPC is considering a range of remedies,
including increased faculty involvement in pre-concentration advising
and the creation of a peer academic advising system.
As professors propose plans that would resolve the apparent
impasse over concentration-choice delay, Laibson said he is
“optimistic” that some of the EPC proposals will come to a full Faculty
vote this spring.
But Laibson and other professors said it would be difficult to
predict when the curricular review will return to the Faculty meeting
agenda.
Dean of Faculty William C. Kirby, who has played a leading role in the review, announced his resignation last month.
“I think with Kirby resigning, the future is very much up in
the air,” said Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology Steven Pinker,
a member of the review’s Committee on General Education.
Pinker said that he and some of his colleagues aren’t
disappointed by the review’s derailment. “Frankly, I wouldn’t shed any
tears if it didn’t pass,” Pinker said.
—Staff writer Lois E. Beckett can be reached at lbeckett@fas.harvard.edu.
—Staff writer Johannah S. Cornblatt can be reached at jcornbl@fas.harvard.edu.`
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