Beneath the Rungs: Locating the Liberal Arts at Harvard

Brian Bolduc is a 2010 graduate of Harvard University and editor emeritus of The Harvard Salient, a fortnightly journal of political thought. This summer he is a Robert L. Bartley Fellow at the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page in New York; stronguc@post.harvard.edu.

You can find the liberal arts at Harvard College—if you look for them.

Harvard requires students to study different subjects, but allows us to pick our courses. To meet the requirement in “Literature and Arts B,” for instance, students can take “History of Art and Architecture 152. Italian Renaissance Art” or “African and African American Studies 121. Please, Wake Up!—Race, Gender, Class and Ethnicity in the Early Films of Spike Lee.” In this academic supermarket, the liberal arts sit on the same shelf with current fads—and often get pushed to the back.

“Practical” classes, meanwhile, are