Harvard Snubs God
Sunday, January 7, 2007
Harvard University, founded 370 years ago to train Puritan ministers, should again require all undergraduates to study religion, along with U.S. history and ethics, a faculty committee is recommending. The surprisingly bold recommendations come after years of rancorous internal debate over what courses should be required of all Harvard students. The current core curriculum has been criticized for focusing on narrow academic questions rather than real-world issues students could likely confront beyond the wrought-iron gates of Harvard Square. The report calls for Harvard to require students to take a course in "reason and faith," which could include classes on topics such as religion and democracy, Charles Darwin or a current course called "Why Americans Love God and Europeans Don't." "Harvard is no longer an institution with a religious mission, but religion is a fact that Harvard's graduates will confront in their lives," the report says, noting 94 percent of incoming students report discussing religion and 71 percent attend services. Harvard University said 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 criticized 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. Labels: Bible in America
My wife, it must be said, is not exactly a reader of Feiler Faster. But she is a contributor! She rolled over in bed last night, while reading the Harvard alumni magazine (insert joke here), and announced she had a great thing for me to blog about: Harvard, as part of curriculum overhaul, would require all students to take a course in religion -- one of five required areas of study. Here's a graf from a piece in the Boston Globe that revealed the plan last October:
Sitting down tonight to write about this plan, which obviously was news when the new alumni magazine went to bed, I happened upon this article from CNN.com, dated December 14:
Having said that, and not being privvy to the internal deliberations, my first reaction is that religion need not be isolated from other large blocks -- social science, liberal arts, history, art, literature -- all of which overlap the study of religion. I mean doesn't religion come up in a lot of classes in the history of Western civilization, the history of Eastern civilization, the art of the Middle Ages, the literature of anywhere, even the history of science? God ought to be in a lot of classes at Harvard. Proposing that he have his own requirement, suggests a greater problem with how universities view the world.
Posted by B Feiler at 9:04 PM
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