After the tumult of the past year, we are embarking on a period of relative stability under interim University President Derek C. Bok and interim Dean of the Faculty Jeremy R. Knowles. Yet we should not think of this time as a return to familiar and comfortable things. To do so would belie what we have learned during recent months. We need to continue what we have been doing for the past three years: working to reshape the curriculum, giving the College the strength and flexibility it needs to educate its current and future students.

The call for curricular renewal was sounded by the Faculty before the arrival of Lawrence H. Summers as president of Harvard, and our steady work toward this goal will not be dropped with his departure from that position. This semester, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) implemented several important changes. We delayed the date by which students must select their concentration until the end of their third semester, we established secondary fields (minors), and we revised the writing requirement to make it more unified, to provide opportunities for advanced courses in writing, and to include a component in oral communication. We also introduced an exciting set of new concentrations in the life sciences that reconfigure the way these fields are conceived. Other proposed changes will be discussed next year, among them the tough nut of general education.

Our current general education requirement, the Core Curriculum, was established in 1979 after six years of careful consideration. Its guiding theme was that students should be inducted into the special “ways of thinking” that characterized the various disciplines. Knowledge was expanding rapidly, and the prevailing idea that students should study a common body of material was becoming increasingly questioned. Some of what now seems arcane in the Core can be explained by intellectual controversies that loomed large when the program was first developed. Today, as the disciplines have grown and changed, the structure of the Core has become dated. It still includes splendid and often inspiring courses, but students often see them as separate elements that do not form a coherent whole.

In the early phase of our review, some members of the Faculty, myself included, saw a simple distribution system as the best solution. (My one nagging doubt was that this kind of requirement is in place at Yale, the institution where “veritas” needs to be supplemented by “lux.”) In its most common form, the distributional scheme requires students to take courses in each of the three traditional divisions: the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences.

Yet this tripartite organization does not do justice to the increasingly porous boundaries between the divisions. In a striking move, the Committee on General Education came up with a new idea: maybe we could have our cake and eat it too. We could combine distribution among the three traditional divisions of learning with a set of special integrating courses that would cross disciplinary boundaries and present some of the most exciting new work being done today.

There is a great deal to be said for this proposal. To be sure, it does not include requirements in moral or quantitative reasoning, as does the current version of the Core. But it does represent very well the transition we are making to a more fluid understanding of how knowledge is structured and how students might be encouraged to learn.

Interdisciplinary courses are difficult to teach, and in many instances they do not work well on an introductory level. There is a certain amount of risk here that cannot be underestimated. Some students find co-taught courses stimulating, but others find them confusing. For the moment, the courses are proposed as optional rather than mandatory. We need to see what kinds of courses are proposed and how well they function within the rest of the undergraduate curriculum. Still, in the best of circumstances, we might ultimately require that every student take an interdisciplinary course. We need to think carefully about how these courses will be structured, what topics they might cover, and whether team teaching is invariably a good thing.

At the end of the spring semester, the FAS was on the brink of voting on this new system, but there was a pervasive sense that we needed more time to work on its details. During the coming summer, the proposal will be reconsidered in the hope that we can move more effectively to a vote on general education in the fall. I myself still wonder if we have paid enough attention to other ways of “cutting the cake.” The Committee on General Education did consider a number of creative new rubrics for general education, and part of me would like to see them give this line of thinking one more whirl.

It may be, however, that the time is not yet ripe for the radically new paradigm I think we ultimately need. The Copernicus of curricular science seems not to have appeared. Still, it is clear that undergraduate education is at a crossroads. As a faculty, we are committed to finding a new way. We continue to move forward energetically.

Judith L. Ryan is Weary Professor of German and Comparative Literature.