As Curricular Reforms Accrue, Students Take Fewer Electives

After five years of professors laboring to improve undergraduate education through curricular changes, they are noticing an unintended consequence: students taking fewer electives.

The problem results both from increased requirements and new opportunities like secondary fields, which were originally designed to give students more options.

While the General Education program will require eight courses rather than the Core’s seven, freshmen continue to take Expository Writing, students strive for foreign language citations, and new secondary fields blossom. There will be little wiggle room for students hoping to graduate with 32 total courses and also pursue intellectual whims.

“My sense watching it all happen was that there was no overall design to this,” said former Dean of the College Harry R. Lewis ’68, who was an active participant in the Faculty debates surrounding Gen Ed.

“The problem was not that any of these changes were a bad idea—but sometimes you have to choose between good ideas,” he said. “When you try to do everything, in the overall picture, you create this lack of flexibility.”

Current administrators said that they are well aware of this danger.

“There could have been better planning and coordination in the implementation and roll-out in changes that were made in the past five years,” said Associate Dean of Undergraduate Education Stephanie H. Kenen. “The leadership was in a mode of doing things quickly.”

But some professors said that there could have been more leadership during the discussion.

“It’s just there was no one person standing over the entire program keeping an eye on each little piece,” said philosophy professor Alison Simmons, who was co-chair of the Task Force on General Education.

As a result, delayed concentration choice may not be a reality for many students.

“There’s going to be a natural incentive for people to lock down their schedule even earlier,” Lewis said. “How can they get a foreign language citation and secondary field and study abroad if they don’t have it logjammed by freshman year?”

Kenen said this may not present a significant problem, since secondary fields are not required, and students will have to prioritize.

But Lewis said that the newly designed secondary fields will almost guarantee that Harvard undergraduates, who are “high achievers,” will go after this new opportunity for recognition.

To remedy this problem, leaders of the new Gen Ed program said that they are hoping that more classes will double-count.

Although only one course from a secondary field can currently double-count for the Core or Gen Ed, Kenen said that she will ask the Educational Policy Committee to repeal the rule this spring.

Kenen added that students will hopefully be able to double-count one or two Gen Ed courses toward their concentration too.

Even one of the architects of the Gen Ed report said that, in retrospect, he wishes there were fewer requirements.

“Personally, I was of the view we should have fewer required categories,” English professor Louis Menand said.

In the meantime, the concerns that Lewis raised at the final Gen Ed vote in May 2007 may materialize.

“Instead of intellectual exploration,” he said then, “students will spend four years playing intellectual hop-scotch—jumping from square to square, trying to land on the right courses at just the right times.”

—Staff writer Bonnie J. Kavoussi can be reached at kavoussi@fas.harvard.edu.