
Curricular Review: Redefining a World-Class Education
	Introduction to the Curricular Review	3:38
	A Harvard Education: Two Tensions	7:18
	Concentrations, Calendars, and Contexts	7:08
	Audience Question & Answer: Part One	9:47
	Audience Question & Answer: Part Two	11:50
History, Structure, and Content of American Academic Culture		41:39

	A Harvard Education: Two Tensions
	When we think about Harvard's curriculum for the next century, there are two tensions that need to be resolved. The first, common to all universities, is the tension between requirements and flexibility. Everyone wants to offer students an unrestricted curriculum that should include "just this one thing"; the problem is — from Durkheim and Marx to the great novelists to the second law of thermodynamics—there's little or no consensus about what "this one thing" should be. <br> <br> For centuries, all of Harvard's curriculum was compulsory, including "mostly the ancient languages of the Bible" and science that was "as ancient as the languages." Only at the end of the 19th century did the Harvard President, Charles W. Eliot institute a free-choice curriculum, and his early 20th century successor, A. Lawrence Lowell, reintroduced structure into the course of study in the form of concentrations and tutorials. Today the Core curriculum is considered a "constrained choice general education requirement," organized around eleven different key areas, seven of them mandatory for undergraduate study.<br> <br> The second tension, characteristic of great universities, concerns the competing imperatives of conducting cutting-edge research while teaching College courses. Faculty members attest that their undergraduate teaching is "the greatest part of the Harvard experience." University luminaries, such as President Lawrence Summers, Provost Steven Hyman, and Nobel laureate chemist Dudley Herschbach, teach some of the College's 105 Freshman Seminars, in which over a third of the first-year class is enrolled. Leading public intellectuals who are recruited to the University look forward to "testing their ideas" with Harvard's "extraordinary" students. The curricular review will examine ways to maximize faculty time with undergraduates and to involve the College's sister faculties, such as the Business, Law, and Medical Schools, in undergraduate instruction.<br> <br>

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