Harvard's Curricular Stirrings
Harvard's president, Lawrence H. Summers, said of the emphasis on science:"An educational culture where it's an embarrassment to not know the names of five plays by Shakespeare but O.K. not to know the difference between a gene and a chromosome isn't functional."If I could dictate a sole required course over in that division for our students it wouldn't be biology, though -- it would be statistics. I think a good statistics course is essential for the committee's goal that "Graduates of Harvard College should be able to understand the news and expository articles in journals such as Science and Nature."
I'd be even happier if they require serious language study before students go abroad -- and to my mildly informed knowledge that's not common in American study abroad programs that aren't focused on language programs. For instance, we have programs in France and the Dominican Republic that have prerequisites stiff enough to limit them to majors or minors in the target languages, but we let people amble off to India and Italy with a semester of study, about 40 contact hours over 15 weeks (more or less). That's not at all uncommon (I've looked at lots of other places programs on the web while arguing about our requirements last year).
One can make noises about educating people to not think an anglophone world is inevitable, but not learning langugages is a tradition in American education difficult to dislodge.