A statistically improbable polymath's views on politics and culture.

 
Or,
Committee Urges Harvard to Expand the Reach of Its Undergraduate Curriculum

"[S]tudents need more room for broad exploration [....] After 15 months of study, a committee of administrators, professors and students has recommended that the university give students more time to choose their majors and limit the requirements for those majors, encourage students to spend time abroad and increase the number of required science courses."

When I was visiting Harvard I believe they noted that one-quarter of your credits were core requirements, one-half were major-related, and one-fourth were electives. At Chicago it's more like one-third for each category, which makes double majoring--sorry, concentrating--in really disparate subjects doable (I'm a math concentrator considering picking up a history major as well).

""It's always an important event when Harvard College undertakes a review of the curriculum because where Harvard leads others follow," said James O. Freedman, president emeritus of Dartmouth College, and the author of "Liberal Education and the Public Interest" (University of Iowa Press, 2003), which the Harvard committee was required to read."

Um... we're not "following" here. I mean, we were here first. Yeah, all of you laughed at our hard-core Common Core--I'm looking at you, Brown--saying it was a relic of the Edwardian era.

Now the real question is this: Will Brown abandon its famous "anything goes" curriculum? Stay tuned.
posted by Maureen at 1:21 AM