Secondary Fields Open to Seniors

Members of the Class of 2007 will be the first students in Harvard history to graduate with secondary fields on their transcripts.

In the past month, a faculty committee approved dozens of applications to create the first “minors” available to Harvard undergraduates since the inception of the concentrations system in 1919. A new Web site, secondaryfields.fas.harvard.edu, details 49 secondary fields of four to six half-courses now available in 27 departments.

Across the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, department heads were cautious in forecasting the impact of secondary fields.

“No one was able to predict, or pretend to predict, what secondary fields would mean for large departments,” said Nancy L. Rosenblum, the chair of the Government Department, home to the second-largest concentration after economics.

Part of the impetus for implementing secondary fields was to attract more students to smaller departments as secondary concentrators, according to Rosenblum.

Some professors, including Rosenblum, argued that it remains to be seen whether such a shift will actually occur.

Deborah Foster, the director of undergraduate studies in folklore and mythology, said that if students flock to larger departments for their primary concentration, smaller ones might become, in essence, secondary fields.

“Will students who have certain ideas about the future—or whose parents have certain ideas about the future—be able to do a secondary field in economics and concentrate in one of the smaller programs they are more interested in?” Foster said. “Or, alternatively, will students all pick the concentration that seems to flow more fluidly into the future?”

Nevertheless, the Standing Committee on Degrees in Folklore and Mythology’s decision to submit a secondary field proposal was “totally unanimous,” according to Foster.

“If secondary fields will enable students who are very interested in the topics and methodologies of our field to have some piece of it, we’re delighted that the secondary fields make that possible,” Foster said.

The approved proposals include one from the Department of Economics, which missed the deadline for fall semester consideration of secondary fields by almost a month.

Assistant Dean of the College Stephanie H. Kenen, who is coordinating the approval process, said administrators encouraged the Department of Economics to implement a secondary field. At a Faculty meeting last spring, some economists had cautioned that a possible influx of students could overwhelm a department already home to the largest number of concentrators.

“Once they were going to do it, we wanted to make sure we responded quickly,” Kenen said.

The six-half-course secondary field in economics provides students with the opportunity to learn the basics of economics, while allowing them to pursue their main interests in a different concentration, according to Professor of Economics James H. Stock, the department chair.

“We have kept the secondary concentration simple and—not surprisingly for economists—have tried to allow considerable freedom of choice,” Stock wrote in an e-mail.

In the fall, the department polled students in Social Analysis 10, “Principles of Economics,” (Ec 10) on their thoughts about primary and secondary concentrations. The poll suggested that the number of students pursuing a secondary field in economics would fall in the range of 150 to 200 per class.

This estimate is consistent with the theory that the increase of more than 200 in Ec 10 enrollment this year can be attributed to students interested in economics as a secondary, but not primary, concentration, according to Stock.

The Faculty’s Educational Policy Committee has yet to examine non-departmental proposals, including ones for archaeology, global health, health policy, and mind, brain, and behavior.

The EPC will begin reviewing these proposals in early February, but secondary fields in those areas will not be available for June 2007 graduates.

“We don’t necessarily want students to be planning their lives around this,” Kenen said of secondary fields. “It’ not something that we want or expect every student to do because it’s there. If students decide to do this, they’re probably giving up something else.”