The introduction continues by saying that "Social Analysis courses are not intended to survey a particular discipline, but rather to illustrate the applications of analytical methods to important problems involving the behavior of people and institutions."
But this description grossly mischaracterizes Social Analysis 10 and 38, which do, in fact, survey the disciplines of economics and sociology, respectively.
Judging from the Core courses that meet the Social Analysis requirement, departments that could easily correspond to this requirement would be economics, sociology, linguistics and psychology.
The Foreign Cultures requirement is included to "expand the range of students' cultural experience and to provide fresh perspectives on their own cultural assumptions and traditions." (Fresh?)
To satisfy this requirement, students should be allowed to choose a course within any department devoted to the study of a particular race, ethnicity or region of the world. Another option for complying with the Foreign Cultures requirement should be spending at least one academic semester abroad.
Actual experiences abroad are arguably far more able to meet the stated goals of this requirement than any classroom experience at Harvard.
Besides the unnecessarily restrictive policies of the Core, student options are also limited by a general dearth of departmental courses for any one semester.
This becomes especially problematic when students must meet particular course requirements that are offered only once every year, if not once every two years.
In the Philosophy Department, for example, students who want to fulfill the deductive logic requirement can only do so during the fall at 10 a.m. on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.
Current students who want to take metaphysics, one of the cornerstones of philosophy (and a course that can fulfill a requirement), can only do so by taking it in the fall of '93 at 1 p.m. on Mondays and Wednesdays. What if you want to (or have to) take another class at that time in the fall of '93?
As much as possible, courses that are departmental requirements should be offered every year, if not every semester. This policy would make it easier for many students to comply with departmental requirements.
Many students have as little as two years to satisfy departmental requirements, because they have been abroad, they have transferred in from another college, or because they have decided, at the last minute, to change concentrations.
The current policy penalizes such students by severely reducing the number of options they have to complete the same number of requirements, in a shorter amount of time.
In short, students should be allowed to fulfill core requirements with appropriate departmental courses, and individual departments should insure that students who have only two years in which to satisfy their requirements can do so with a reasonable number of course options.
Gil B. Lahav '94, an editor of The Crimson, is a philosophy concentrator.