Reading Period

To a person unfamiliar with course organization at Harvard, the two-week period before midyear, and the three week interim before final, exams might look suspiciously like time set aside for cramming. In fact, he might think unprincipled professors used these periods to gather up the odds and ends, or the dregs, of their courses, enabling them to stuff their students a little fuller and to cross off the remaining titles on their syllabi. Taking notice of the remarkable number of extracurricular activities at Harvard, and taking human nature into account, he probably would doubt that periods placed at such propitious times were ever used for advanced study in the course, that Fall and Spring term Reading Periods were intended to be capstones, not cramming orgies or catch-alls. Such doubts and suspicions would be extremly well founded.

There are some on the inside who have doubts, too, and when the Committee on Educational Policy meets next week to decide the fate of the Reading Periods, there is some chance the program will be done away with entirely. Certainly the abuse of the Reading Period system in the past, and both students and faculty members are guilty, would justify abandoning it altogether, but we hope this does not happen. The idea of Reading Period is sound; its faulty execution is what ruins it. If professors would point their curriculum so as to culminate in two or three weeks of either intensive, high-level study of extant course material or individual study of new material related to the course, Reading Period might in fact do its hypothetical duty. They would have to be conscious of another unpleasantry in human nature, of course, and verify their students' diligence either on the final exam or by other means. Students would have to cooperate to the extent of aiming at something besides a good mark in the course, which admittedly, is asking a good deal. If Reading Period could be reinstated to its original pupose, by straightening up the teachers and straightening out their pupils, it could be profitable for them both.