In the Chronicle of Higher Education, Harvard's Harry Lewis makes the case for a core curriculum, doing his best to reinvigorate a discussion that Harvard is desperately trying to avoid.

Within academe it is hard to inspire support for a core for a simple reason. We have not come to agreement — indeed we have had little discussion — about the purpose of higher education. In the absence of any big concept about what college is supposed to do for students, both students and faculty members prefer the freedom of choice that comes with the elective curriculum. We would each rather do our own thing than embrace our collective responsibility for the common good. But the argument that students have nothing in common is false, and the conclusion that a college education should have no core is wrong.

...Harvard's 2006 report on general education, from which the new curriculum emerged, was a striking effort to define a core. The professors who produced the proposal labored under difficult and thankless conditions. They had to start from scratch in an atmosphere of administrative instability. With the faculty under interim leadership, their idealism fell victim to turf battles in a series of redrafts and amendments. In dubbing one required area of study "The United States and the World," they were accused of implying that the world was merely America's "backyard."

One wonders if Lewis' attempt to get people thinking about what it truly means to educate Americans will gain traction, or if everyone at Harvard just wants this nasty curricular business to go away.....