Harvard drops religion course
December 14 2006 at 11:23AM
By Jason Szep
Boston - Harvard University said on Wednesday it had dropped a controversial
proposal that would have required all undergraduates to study religion as
part of the biggest overhaul of its curriculum in three decades.
Efforts to revamp Harvard's curriculum, which has been criticised for
focusing too narrowly on academic topics instead of real-life issues, have
been in the works for three years.
A proposal for a "reason and faith" course requirement, which would have set
Harvard apart from many other universities and made it unique among its
peers in the elite Ivy League, was unveiled in a preliminary report in
October.
"We have removed 'reason and faith' as a distinct category," a faculty task
force said in a revised report, excepts of which were obtained by Reuters.
"Courses dealing with religion - both those examining normative reasoning in
a religious context and those engaging in a descriptive examination of the
roles that religion plays today and has historically played - can be readily
accommodated in other categories," it said.
Harvard professor Louis Menand, who co-chaired the committee that drafted
the plan, said religion competed with other, equally valid subjects.
"It is an important subject but nationalism is an important subject, and
race is an important subject and markets is an important subject," said
Menand, whose book "The Metaphysical Club" won a Pulitzer Prize for history
in 2002.
"If we are going to go to that level of specificity of what we require there
are probably half a dozen other things that can compete with it. So we
thought we had to bump up the subject descriptions to include more things
than religion."
The task force comprising six professors and two students released the
report to faculty last week. A final report will be presented in January to
faculty, who have a chance to add suggestions and decide whether to
implement the requirements.
"We feel we are pretty close to done and the faculty seems interested in
what we have proposed," Menand said.
The proposals include a course requirement on "what it means to be a human
being," which is expected to broadly cover a number of areas in the
humanities. They also proposed two science courses among several other
requirements.
These include a course examining the United States in context of the rest of
world and courses on global societies, cultural traditions, and human nature
and the human condition.
The curriculum shake-up, the first major overhaul since Harvard formulated
its current "core" course requirements in the 1970s, had been advanced by
former Harvard President Lawrence Summers, who resigned his post in June
after a faculty revolt over unrelated issues.
Course requirements at America's eight Ivy League schools vary widely, but
if Harvard's proposal for a "faith and reason" requirement had been accepted
it would have been the only one where a course in religion was required.
It would have also marked a nod to Harvard's roots as a school founded to
train Puritan ministers 370 years ago.
http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click_id=22&art_id=qw1166085901450B261
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