Boston, USA - Founded to train Puritan ministers 370 years ago, Harvard University may soon require all undergraduates to study religion, ethics and U.S. history in the biggest overhaul of its curriculum in three decades.
Culminating a process advanced by controversial former Harvard President Lawrence Summers, a 39-page proposal describing the changes was circulated this week to faculty members. Next month they will discuss the plan, which would set Harvard apart from many other secular universities and make it unique among its Ivy League peers.
Efforts to revamp Harvard's curriculum, which has been criticized for concentrating too narrowly on academic topics instead of real-life issues, have been in the works for three years.
Summers, a former U.S. treasury secretary who resigned Harvard's top job in June after a faculty revolt, had proposed building up the sciences and giving students greater international exposure.
But a curriculum plan put forth in January was rejected by faculty. The latest proposal adding an emphasis on religion was produced by a new faculty-student committee that began work earlier this year.
Now, with the search on for a new president, Harvard may be giving a small nod to its religious past while trying to better prepare students for a world in which religious issues often dominate headlines.
"As a secular institution, Harvard does not teach religion," prominent writer and Harvard professor Louis Menand, who co-chaired the committee that drafted the plan, said on Thursday.
"But it is an important part of the life of most people, and we think it is important that students have some course that introduces them to that subject," said Menand, whose book "The Metaphysical Club" won a Pulitzer Prize for history in 2002.
HIGH-LEVEL DEPARTURE
The new requirement aims to help students understand the interplay between religious and secular institutions and some newly developed courses might include "The Wars of Religion," the committee of six faculty members and two students wrote.
How Harvard's faculty will react to the new proposal, which will be discussed at a faculty meeting on November 14, is still uncertain. Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences will have to approve the plan.
"I think there will be changes (to the proposal) but the encouraging part is that people think there I something here to talk about," Menand said.
Course requirements at the eight Ivy League schools vary widely, but if Harvard's proposal were accepted it would be the only one where both courses in religion and U.S. history are required, according to the schools' Web sites and a Harvard official.
Separately on Thursday, Harvard said Joseph Martin, the long-serving dean of the university's medical school who was known as a champion of interdisciplinary research, will resign in July 2007.
Martin is the latest in a string of high profile departures -- the university said more than half of its major deans and top administrators have left in the five years Summers was president. While each dean, including the dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the dean of the Graduate School of Education gave different reasons for leaving, analysts say short tenures are often disruptive at a university.