History’s new meaning: re-introducing history at Harvard. From the article:

Harvard’s History department has made a number of structural changes to its curriculum and outreach efforts this semester in an attempt to attract and retain concentrators and unaffiliated undergraduates.

Most notably, this fall the department rolled out a new series of “foundations” courses geared toward freshmen and students outside the concentration, including those attempting to fulfill the General Education program’s new Social Sciences distributional requirement….

Professor Maya R. Jasanoff ’96 said the changes were driven by a need to repair history’s “image problem,” adding that freshmen often enter Harvard with the misconception that the discipline is merely “a bunch of names and dates to be memorized.”

“People think it’s all about the past, but it’s really about the present and the future,” she said.

Director of Undergraduate Studies Lisa M. McGirr, who spearheaded the overhaul, agreed. She said that the changes were in part borne out of a “crisis in the humanities” that followed the 2008 recession, when she says more and more undergraduates began selecting their concentrations based on employability concerns….

In another attempt to combat the “crisis,” Harvard’s History department also debuted new “career course clusters” this fall. McGirr said the clusters are designed to guide students interested in business, journalism, and law career paths among others toward History courses that will be useful in their chosen fields.

“People feel insecure. They want to ensure that they have a skill set that they can take beyond college for their future careers,” McGirr said. “What we know, and what we’re trying to make sure students understand, is that the kind of skills they gain in History — those fundamental skills of powers of communication, of really great writing and critical analysis — those are the kind of things that are going to be used in all sorts of careers.”

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