Core, Canon, Curriculum

Abstract

IT IS A VERY GENUINE PLEASURE to be here, but I feel that I should not be meeting your gracious invitation with due candor if I did not confess at once to the limits of my credentials for addressing a body so nationally representative and so professionally active. My own experience as a college student and a university teacher can claim some amount of length, but rather too little of breadth. It started when I matriculated as a freshman at Harvard fifty-one years ago last September, and has never been disengaged from that attachment, except for brief academic visits elsewhere-and for special occasions like the present, which I especially value because they mitigate the inherent provincialism of my educational orbit. Now it might be observed, to Harvard's possible advantage, that no one could act as a typical spokesman for it; certainly I could make no pretense of doing so. When I arrived there first, as a high-school graduate from the Middle West, the majority of the student body was composed of graduates from northeastern preparatory schools. In those days, too, I was counted among an ethnic minority unwelcomed by anything like Affirmative Action. But, since the theme of this convention, Unity in Diversity, is one that calls for frequent illustration, you will understand when I draw examples from what has become most familiar to me through the habit of years. This reversion to provinciality allows me to begin near the beginning-at least for English-speaking institutions of higher learning within our hemisphere. Even in seventeenth-century America any innovation had to be a continuation, though with the divergence that was then separating Puritans from Anglicans at Cambridge University: Harvard at its beginning placed considerably more emphasis than the English university did on Hebrew, Aramaic, the Old Testament, and such antischolastic Calvinists as Petrus Ramus. Otherwise, the original course of study doggedly emulated its European model. Latin was not so much taught as taken for granted, the idiom of lectures, recitations, oral examinations, other exercises, and ceremonials. Politics and science entered the discussion so far as they had been treated by Aristotle or other ancients. All subjects were prescribed, hour by hour, day by day, year by year, and presented often by the same tutors. A theological school would not be consecrated until Harvard went Unitarian in the nineteenth