“Instead they are submerged in their department or sitting on review committees,” he added.

SAME THINKERS

Despite such struggles, Hoffmann said he is pleased with his vision as it exists today.

For the first two years, social studies tutorials did not count towards academic credit, so students had to take them in addition to their full course load.

The original concentrators could choose between three focus fields: International Relations, Problems of Industrial Societies, and Problems of Developing Societies. In 2005, a review committee decided the focus fields—which by then had evolved to be Industrial Societies, Developed Societies, Social Theory, International Relations, and Culture and Personality—were too broad, Bernstein said.

The class of 2010 will be the first concentrators to graduate under the new system, which allows students to design a specific focus field  that must pass through a review process. Bernstein said most focus fields combine

an issue and a region—for instance, Education in Rural America.

Remarkably, the tutorial-based structure and syllabus has changed relatively little in the 50 years Social Studies has been a part of the University.

While students today might not have to read the whole of “The Wealth of Nations” in a week, they still gather to discuss the classics of social theory in hopes of accumulating a wide range of tools to analyze their surroundings.

“In fact, just a few years ago we had a T-shirt contest and the winning slogan was, ‘Social Studies: changing the world in 30,000 words or less,’” said Bernstein, referring to the maximum length of a Social Studies thesis. “We are dedicated first and foremost to inquiry and the passion to understand the world and engage with it.”

—Staff writer Erika P. Pierson can be reached at epierson@fas.harvard.edu.