Prioritize the Curriculum

Of all 71 planks in the campaign platform of Undergraduate Council President Matthew W. Mahan ’05, only one concerns the ongoing curricular review. Yet the College’s curriculum will only be comprehensively reviewed once every 30 years, and the exhaustive process can change the way academics all over the country approach undergraduate education. The new leader of the College’s student government has to change his priorities.

We have long begged council presidents to focus on student services, and we expect Mahan to follow through on his campaign planks offering to improve life at the College—from fighting for a real student center to implementing a keg return service. But this year, the council will have more to worry about than just extended party hours and student representation on the Ad Board. Now that the cogs of the curricular review are turning, Mahan should make it his top priority to lead the council in engaging the administrators, faculty and students on the curricular review committees. As a body ostensibly representing Harvard undergraduates, the council must stick up for the students in a process that will have profound effects for future generations of Harvard students.

Engaging the campus community in the process does not mean simply holding “town hall meetings” at which students can voice their views—although that is a laudable goal listed in Mahan’s platform. In order to persuasively lobby on students’ behalves, the council must improve the way it gauges student attitudes and actively encourage students to express those opinions. Town hall meetings might draw a few curricular review enthusiasts, but most students are too busy to discuss policy changes that may not affect them. Council representatives must bring the curricular review to dining halls and House e-mail lists—promoting discussion on particular proposals and reporting what they hear back to the council.

The council must also take an even more active role in processing those opinions—passing resolutions on a range of curricular issues such as the core, undergraduate advising, the tutorial system, etc. Because administrators hope to narrow the review in the next several months, it is imperative that the council start soon. They should proactively piece together a vision for undergraduate education that makes student concerns a priority—instead of allowing Harvard to remain an impersonal research institution which has a tendency to err on the side of administrative convenience to the detriment of educational benefit.

The council has to do more than just pass resolutions, or else its work will be ignored. Council leaders must forge ties with the committees that will eventually make policy recommendations and lobby hard for the council’s platform. The administrators, faculty and students on the committees will not pay attention to the machinations of student government unless council members drive the message home personally.

The bottom line is that Harvard education as we know it is going to change, perhaps drastically. The Undergraduate Council has to mount an all-out campaign—fostering debate, gathering student opinion and fighting for it—to make sure it changes for the better.