Some Thoughts on Curriculum and Change

It should go without saying that in the twentieth-century history of American higher education, each significant curricular reform movement has had a distinct political agenda. This is particularly true for initiatives designed to create decisive changes in the shape of the undergraduate curriculum. In those circumstances in which a political movement and an institutional initiative have coincided, a distinct political purpose can be discerned in what the institution required of its students and how the program was articulated. The historical moment was certainly at issue in the case of the reforms of the 1930s. Men such as Robert Hutchins, Stringfellow Barr, and Scott Buchanan saw in the idea of a core curriculum a way to realize their ideal construct of democracy. The Great Books concept and the variants of the core at Chicago had at their root a notion of natural rights and the social contract. Inherent in that framing of the body politic were concepts of freedom and civic responsibility. The objective was clear: one needed to educate young Americans—the elite of the nation—to steer the country away from the extremes of fascism and communism. Radical reform was imperative, since during the Great Depression both of these alternatives appeared politically viable. In the post-World War II era, the Cold War framed most of the discussion about the curriculum. This claim may seem odd, but on closer inspection, beginning with Harvard's general education reform from the early 1950s, the concept of the university, until the late 1980s, was substantially defined by a consciousness of how much the United States constituted an alternative to political unfreedom. The elective-course system in its new Harvard form, combined with distribution requirements and an enormous premium on undergraduate specialization, was a kind of metaphorical mirror of the idealized free marketplace of ideas. We were convinced that we were training young people to cherish the advantages of free choice and liberty in a world in which the grim alternative of totalitarianism was not a mirage but a present danger.