0.cached.png
By Newsweek Editors
0
Share
Newsweek is a Trust Project member
See more of our trusted coverage when you search.Prefer Newsweek on Googleto see more of our trusted coverage when you search.
In the spring of 2004, Harvard announced to much fanfare the results of its first curricular review in 30 years. But not everybody was impressed, including the vice provost for undergraduate education at Stanford, John Bravman. Among the review's recommendations: replacing the core curriculum with a more malleable set of requirements that emphasize interdisciplinary approaches; enhancing the focus on science and international studies, including languages and travel abroad, and fostering closer interaction between students and faculty, particularly in seminars. "Harvard is always going to get the press, but they were behind Stanford, Princeton and Yale" with this report, says Bravman. "It's particularly humorous and galling to read in Harvard's study that [only now] they decided study overseas is important."
Despite that uncharitable verdict, the fact remains that when Harvard talks, the rest of the academy listens. It's true that most of the proposals it floated have been in place for years at other universities. But what Harvard did, in effect, was to lend its imprimatur to those reforms it deems necessary to usher liberal arts and science education into the 21st century. "Harvard has not been, in general-education reform, a great innovator," says Arthur Levine, president of Columbia University's Teachers College and an author on the topic. "It's been a popularizer. It announces that this is now in fashion, and other schools notice and replicate it."
But while many schools follow Harvard's lead, plenty of others provided precedents for its recommendations. The University of Michigan has had a longstanding--and, until recently, atypical--requirement of four semesters of foreign-language study. As a result of Stanford's curricular review in the mid-'90s, the university added hundreds of freshman and sophomore seminars, as well as an expanded overseas-studies program. It also developed a new writing and rhetoric program similar to what Harvard is recommending. At Yale, which completed its most recent review in 2003, the committee in charge concluded that its undergraduate science education needed rejiggering. "We want to offer students a much more exciting introduction to sciences and allow them to become scientifically literate," says Peter Salovey, dean of Yale College. The university is planning to open a science-education center that will develop courses in "contextualized science" that examine phenomena like global warming or the evolution of the cosmos.
Read More on News
The Harvard reforms highlight broader trends in undergraduate education. For one, many universities are increasingly offering students greater flexibility in ful-filling "distribution requirements"--those mandates to take classes in particular areas like the humanities--by boosting the number of course options. That's a pronounced change from the late 1970s, when Harvard and other universities were introducing more rigorous requirements. "The cycle is roughly every 35 years or so," says Levine. "With the predictability of a metronome, colleges and universities move from requirements toward electives and back."
Larger universities are also aiming to bring their full resources more within reach of undergraduates. The University of Michigan, for instance, is trying to strengthen the connection between its professional schools and younger students. "You don't want the undergraduate major to be isolated from the rest of the campus," says Associate Dean Robert Owen. "We need to take advantage of a huge research university and get some of that culture down to undergrads."
Nevertheless, many colleges continue to stick to their distinctive approaches. Take Brown, where there are still no distribution requirements (though there are still requirements to fulfill a major). "We believe students learn best what they choose to study," says Paul Armstrong, dean of the college. "We're offering them the opportunity to become architects of their own curriculum." At the other end of the spectrum, the University of Chicago has no plans to abandon its stringent general-education core--often called the "Great Books" curriculum--which is steeped in the Western canon. Freshmen and sophomores "need to be exposed to a broad range of ideas and options," says John Boyer, dean of the college. "The core curriculum at Chicago and Columbia [which has a similar program] structures those explorations." All of which points to the uniqueness of American higher education: its rich variety. Would students want it any other way?
View 0 Comments
Submit Correction
View Editorial & AI Guidelines