In their football rivalry that dates back to 1877, Harvard holds a commanding advantage over Columbia, the Crimson having won fifty-three of their joint contests as against just fourteen defeats, including a 34–14 decision over the Lions last season. Among Ivy League institutions, Harvard has long had one of the strongest football programs and Columbia one of the weakest.
Yet in a head-to-head contest between the undergraduate curricula at these two institutions, Columbia has more than held its own against its Ivy League rival. For nearly a century, the two universities have stood as national models for diametrically opposed approaches to undergraduate education. Harvard, under the leadership of Charles William Eliot from 1869 to 1909, pioneered the elective system under which students were given broad choices in course selections and areas of study. Columbia, guided by luminaries like John Erskine, Mark Van Doren, and Jacques Barzun, established a core curriculum shortly after World War I based upon the classic writings of Western Civilization. Harvard, as Daniel Bell has written, became known for its lectures, Columbia for its small seminars. Over the subsequent decades, other colleges and universities across the country adopted one or the other of these two approaches to undergraduate education.
The established curricula at Harvard and Columbia survived the multicultural battles of the 1980s and 1990s with only minor and marginal concessions to their critics. In recent years, both institutions have undertaken reviews of their educational regimens in response to claims that they are out
