Core Curriculum
As of July 2008, the General Education Committee assumed responsibility for the Core Curriculum. Faculty subcommittees under the umbrella of the General Education Committee, will be responsible for reviewing courses proposed for Core credit. For further information, please consult the Director of the Core Program, Susan Lewis, 77 Dunster Street.
Faculty of the Committee on General Education
Jay M. Harris, Harry Austryn Wolfson Professor of Jewish Studies (Chair)
Ali S. Asani, Professor of the Practice of Indo-Muslim Languages and Cultures
Julie A. Buckler, Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures
Scott V. Edwards, Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology and Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology
Jerry R. Green, John Leverett Professor and David A. Wells Professor of Political Economy
Edward J. Hall, Professor of Philosophy
Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Victor S. Thomas Professor of History and of African and African American Studies
Jennifer L. Hochschild, Henry LaBarre Jayne Professor of Government and Professor of African and African American Studies, Harvard College Professor (on leave spring term)
Andrew W. Murray, Herchel Smith Professor of Molecular Genetics
Howard A. Stone, Vicky Joseph Professor of Engineering and Applied Mathematics (on leave spring term)
The Core Curriculum Program
The philosophy of the Core Curriculum rests on the conviction that every Harvard graduate should be broadly educated, as well as trained in a particular academic specialty or concentration. It assumes that students need some guidance in achieving this goal, and that the faculty has an obligation to direct them toward the knowledge, intellectual skills, and habits of thought that are the hallmarks of educated men and women.
But the Core differs from other programs of general education. It does not define intellectual breadth as the mastery of a set of Great Books, or the digestion of a specific quantum of information, or the surveying of current knowledge in certain fields. Rather, the Core seeks to introduce students to the major approaches to knowledge in areas that the faculty considers indispensable to undergraduate education. It aims to show what kinds of knowledge and what forms of inquiry exist in these areas, how different means of analysis are acquired, how they are used, and what their value is.