A Salutary Separation

“Extracurricular activity is a Harvard success story,” claims the Task Force on General Education’s latest report, and rightly so. To capitalize on that success, the report goes on to reason, why not develop an initiative to “help students see how what they learn in class informs what they do outside of class and vice versa?” Witness the birthing of “activity-based learning,” the misbegotten pedagogical stepchild of the recent curricular review.

The Task Force’s attempt to transfuse the vitality of the endeavors that students pursue outside the classroom into what is an oftentimes-inert academic experience is ill-conceived, to say the least. Instead of enlivening students’ academic experience, as the Task Force hopes, we fear that it will deaden the extracurricular scene.

Undergraduates spend the time they have outside of class in hundreds of different ways, in the pursuit of almost as many goals. Nevertheless, whether it be to find a passion, to explore a profession, to make lasting friendships, or simply to indulge a whim, extracurricular pursuits are an escape from academics, a sphere free from the demands of professors and the pressures of a transcript grade, a sphere in which one can learn self-reliance and life skills that cannot be taught in the ivory tower.

With this in mind, we view with wariness the Task Force’s claim that, in proposing an activity-based learning initative, it does “not seek to bureaucratize extracurricular life at Harvard.” Indeed, such a top-down-mandated program is inherently paternalistic. Far from forging valuable links within and without the classroom, this proposal would only get in the way. If there are in fact links to be forged, Harvard students are smart enough to forge them on their own without the “help” of papers or assignments. And if the student in question was drawn to an extracurricular expressly to escape academics, so much the worse. In fact, the only thing that such a policy would accomplish would be to bureaucratize extracurricular life at Harvard.

The College’s laissez-faire attitude towards the life that its students lead outside of the Yard’s classrooms has long been mutually beneficial. If the Task Force wishes to make students regard their academic life with the same excitement as they do their extracurricular affairs, it should focus on improving the quality of classes rather than borrowing students’ enthusiasm for the life they lead outside of coursework and risk infringing upon an arrangement that works so well.



While we support the Task Force on General Education’s overarching philosophy for a liberal arts education designed to ready Harvard College graduates for a fulfilling life as educated men and women, in this instance, we feel the Task Force has gone too far. Therefore, we urge the Faculty not to accept the “activity based learning” section of its report.

Instead, the College should continue its policy of salutary neglect toward extracurricular activities and recognize that the “tendency on the part of many students to regard their extracurricular life as separate from their academic experience” is in fact a boon, not a burden.