Secretary of Education William J. Bennett says Harvard exemplifies a failure of universities nationwide to meet their obligations to students, according to the prepared text of an address he is to deliver this afternoon at a Sanders Theater.

"There are too many intellectual and educational casualties among the student body of Harvard," Bennett says. "Our students deserve better."

Bennett, a 1971 graduate of the Law School, was invited to speak on the state of higher education as part of the College's 350th anniversary celebration. His speech is an assault on the moral, intellectual, and pedagogical condition of America's colleges and universities.

Although a university may be immensely rich, Bennett says, its resources offer no assurance "that Harvard or any similarly situated university is really fulfilling its obligation to its own students of seeing to it that when they leave after four years, they leave as educated men and women."

President Derek C. Bok issued a statement last night denouncing the secretary's remarks as polemical and uninformed.

After reading the speech, Bok, who has been a frequent critic of Bennett since the secretary took office 20 months ago, decided to respond at the event this afternoon (see accompanying story).

In his 19-page text, Bennett assails academia for offering students a "smorgasbord" instead of a fundamental, structured curriculum, and he points to Harvard's Core Curriculum as a glaring example of this failure.

It is "a symbolic nod, a head feint" in the direction of a basic education, Bennett says.

"I think students would benefit from a real core curriculum--i.e., a set of fundamental courses, ordered, purposive, coherent. I cannot discern such a core curriculum here," Bennett says.

"I have studied the Harvard catalog, and I agree that under the heading of the Core Curriculum we find an agglomeration of courses, many of them obviously meaty and important, taught by eminent scholars, on a wide variety of subjects," Bennett says.

"But it seems to me that many of them could more appropriately find their place among the individual offerings of the various departments of instruction, from where, indeed, they give every appearance of having been plucked, only to be regrouped in new combinations."

At a minimum, Bennett says, a solid core curriculum must encompass "the basic body of knowledge which universities once took it upon themselves as their obligation to transmit, under the name of a liberal education."

It includes "a systematic familiarization with our own, Western tradition of learning: with the Classical and Jewish-Christian heritage, the facts of American and European history, the political organization of Western societies, the great works of Western art and literature, [and] the major achievements of the scientific disciplines," he says.

The stated aim of Harvard's five-year-old Core Curriculum is to introduce students to different "modes of learning" or academic approaches. Its authors eschewed the notion that students should be required to master a basic body of knowledge--or that such a body of knowledge could be defined.

Under the Core Curriculum, Bennett says, the quality of a student's Harvard education hinges on a combination of "luck, seren- dipity, chance, peer pressure, and a kind ofinstitutional negligence."