General Education
Faculty of the Committee on General Education
Jay M. Harris, Harry Austryn Wolfson Professor of Jewish Studies (Chair)
Mahzarin R. Banaji, Richard Clarke Cabot Professor of Social Ethics
Julie A. Buckler, Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures
Scott V. Edwards, Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology
Florian Engert, Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology
Edward J. Hall, Professor of Philosophy
John Huth, Donner Professor of Science
Steven R. Levitsky, Professor of Government
Michael J. Puett, Professor of Chinese History
As part of the Harvard College Curricular Review, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences voted to replace the existing, thirty-year-old Core Curriculum requirements with a new Program in General Education in order to align these requirements with the educational needs of Harvard College students at the dawn of the twenty-first century. In contrast with the Core Curriculum, which required that students be exposed to a number of different "ways of knowing," the new Program seeks explicitly to "connect a student’s liberal education - that is, an education conducted in a spirit of free inquiry, rewarding in its own right - to life beyond college." In addition, the new Program in General Education seeks to provide new opportunities for students to learn - and faculty to teach - in ways that cut across traditional departmental and intra-University lines.
The new Program requires that students pass one letter-graded half-course in each of eight categories: Aesthetic and Interpretive Understanding; Culture and Belief; Empirical and Mathematical Reasoning; Ethical Reasoning; Science of Living Systems; Science of the Physical Universe; Societies of the World; United States in the World. One of the eight courses must also engage significantly with study of the past (these courses are identified in the "Note" field of each catalog entry).
Students in the Class of 2013 enter the College under the new General Education requirements. Other students are permitted to switch to the new Program if it fits with their overall curricular plan. All courses that count for General Education also receive a Core designation and thus count for either program.
For the most up-to-date listing of General Education course offerings, please see the on-line version of Courses of Instruction, as well as the website (www.generaleducation.fas.harvard.edu).