Study Card

Short of taking a sabbatical and enrolling in the College for a semester, how can you know what undergraduates study today? Enter The Harvard Sampler, a collection of essays by faculty members derived from or about their courses in the Core Curriculum or its successor, the General Education curriculum (first implemented in 2009, with many Core and departmental offerings carried over, plus dozens of new ones; see www.generaleducation.fas.harvard.edu [6])—intended  to  broaden liberal-arts studies in eight fields. The volume, edited by Jennifer M. Shephard (in the division of social science), Stephen M. Kosslyn (a psychologist and former dean of social science, now director of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford), and Harvard College dean Evelynn M. Hammonds, includes a dozen chapters, in disciplines ranging from evolutionary biology and human rights to global history and psychology. Excerpts from five of the essays (minus their references to the underlying academic literature) follow. The book will be published by Harvard University Press in October.      

~The Editors

Adapted from The Harvard Sampler: Liberal Education for the Twenty-First Century, edited by Jennifer M. Shephard, Stephen M. Kosslyn, and Evelynn M. Hammonds, to be published October 2011 by Harvard University Press. Copyright © 2011 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. All rights reserved.

 

Enhancing Religious Literacy [7]
by Ali S. Asani 

 

Asserting Power Over Technology
in an Era of Leaky Bits [8]
by Harry R. Lewis

 

Literature and the Environment [9] 
by Lawrence Buell

 

Why the Finns Do Not Drink but Die
and the French Drink but Do Not Die [10]
by Karin B. Michels 

 

Accounting for a Good Life [11]
by Thomas M. Scanlon Jr.