When Harvard Decided What Every Graduate Should Know

In the fall of 1917, the United States army commissioned something unusual from Columbia University: a course. The university recruits of the Student Army Training Corps were going to cross the Atlantic to fight in a European war, and someone understood that it was not enough to teach them to shoot; they had to be helped to understand the world in which they were going to do so. The committee that designed that course on "war issues" was chaired by a philosopher, Frederick Woodbridge. When the armistice arrived, Columbia did the calculation in reverse: if a course was needed to go to war, how could peace not require it.

On January 20, 1919, the faculty approved the resolution, and in September Contemporary Civilization got underway: a mandatory course for all first-year students, five days a week, with the same professor from September to June, built concurrently by the departments of history, philosophy, government, economics, sociology, and psychology. Its first director, the philosopher John Coss, summarized the purpose in five words that have aged better than almost everything written that year: to introduce students to "the insistent problems of the present." John Dewey, who did not give praise lightly, said that it was equivalent to a true course in citizenship.

It is worth remembering the order of events, because it disproves the cliché. The core curriculum was not born from the nostalgia of humanities professors; it was born from a world war, in the midst of the industrial era, as a practical response to a practical question: what does a person need to understand, in addition to their trade, to measure up to their time. Whoever defends a general education block before an engineering dean today is not defending an ornament. They are continuing a conversation that began with boots and rifles.

The response of a chemist

Twenty-four years later, the scene is repeated, with another war in the background. In 1943, the president of Harvard, James Bryant Conant—a chemist by training, not at all suspected of disdain for technology—commissioned a committee of professors to answer that same question on the scale of an entire country. The committee worked for two years and published "General Education in a Free Society" in 1945, a university press report that went down in history by the name of its cover: the Red Book.

Its diagnosis sounds as if it were written yesterday. The economic pressure of the Depression years pushed students to specialize as soon as possible, and the university was leaving the other half of its task by the wayside. The proposal was concrete down to the arithmetic: of the sixteen courses in a degree, six had to be in general education—at least one in the humanities, one in the social sciences, one in the sciences—in search of "a common body of information and ideas" that would be the heritage of all graduates. And on its pages remained the distinction that continues to be the cleanest definition of the matter: special education prepares for a trade; general education deals with the student's life "as a human being and a responsible citizen." Harvard implemented the plan in 1951, and the report did something more important than arrange a campus schedule: for decades it shaped the educational conversation across the country. During those same years, in Chicago, Robert Hutchins defended the most radical version of the idea—a canon of great books as an entire curriculum—although his faculty never actually approved it: it remained a seminar he taught with Mortimer Adler since 1931. And Conant himself had been financing, since 1937, reading lists designed for something that then had no name and today fills reports: that a person can continue to educate themselves throughout their life by reading with discipline.

The elegant retreat

In 1978, Harvard changed its response. Dean Henry Rosovsky led the debate that replaced general education with the Core Curriculum, and the shift was fundamental: it was no longer about sharing content—that common civilization that the Red Book took for granted had ceased to be taken for granted—but about teaching methods: how a historian thinks, how a scientist proves something, how a critic reads. Rosovsky, who saw further than many of his critics, left on record that a curriculum is a skeleton and that the flesh, the blood, and the heart would have to come from the unpredictable encounter between professors and students. And he left a prophecy: major curricular changes every twenty-five years, more or less. It was fulfilled with Swiss punctuality: in 2004, the faculty put everything back on the table and concluded that the Core was not being revised, but replaced. The program that succeeded it was approved in 2007 and took effect in 2009.

Read this history with honesty, because it is tempting to read it wrong. Eighty years of changing answers are not the chronicle of a failure; they are the measure of a difficulty. The question of what every graduate should know is so serious that the university that best formulated it has not finished answering it. We have already mentioned here the warning with which Ortega viewed this same landscape: the barbarism of specialization is not cured by decree. Anyone who maintains a humanities block in their curriculum and revises it from time to time with some pain is doing nothing wrong. They are participating, in good company, in the most noble problem of the modern university.

From one hundred to ten thousand

The last chapter is not written at Harvard, but at a university famous for its engineers. In 2017, historian Melinda Zook launched a program at Purdue called Cornerstone: fifteen credits of liberal arts, structured around transformative texts—that is what they call them: the books that stir those who read them—designed not for humanities students, but for those in engineering, business, health, and agriculture. They started with one hundred students. We already told that story when they reached eight thousand. This August, marking its tenth year, the university itself published the figures: more than ten thousand students, one in five enrolled, and the expectation that nearly seventy percent of the incoming class this fall will go through the program. More than ninety-five institutions have replicated it, from community colleges to Stanford and Vanderbilt.

The fine print, as always, is told in full. An enrollment that multiplies by a hundred measures desire and adoption; it does not yet measure the depth of education, and a certificate is not a culture. But the data does a job that no theoretical essay manages: it proves that when general education is offered well—first-rate texts, dedicated professors, a format designed for the technical student—students do not run away from it. They line up.

The question, on your campus

In Spain, and in general in universities with an explicit mission statement, this thread was never entirely cut. Most Catholic universities maintain a mandatory humanistic block; there is no need to import the 1945 question because it has been answered in their curricula for decades. We have also mentioned the gap that accompanies it: nine out of ten vice-rectors believe this education is crucial; one in three believes their students understand it. So the question inherited from the Red Book here is not whether to have general education. It is the other one, the one that answers itself in any campus cafeteria: what grade would your students give it?

A screen from the first stage of TheNomba's journey states it without diplomacy: we have been trained, from a very young age, to be productive; never contemplative. The twelve stages—anthropology, philosophy, history, science, arts—are a contemporary response to Conant's question: the list of subjects that a specialist never crosses, served in the format in which a specialist can cross them. It is not the only possible answer, and this history teaches precisely that none is forever.

The entire arc remains, which is what this piece wanted to keep in view: from a course to understand a war to a certificate chosen by tens of thousands of engineers, passing through a red book that a chemist commissioned in the middle of another war. Harvard appears in this story as what it is: the most famous case of a problem that is also yours. Each campus will offer its version, and revise it, and offer it again. The only thing an entire century has not achieved is for the question to expire.

Cover image generated with artificial intelligence.