Bring Back Shopping Week

This spring, for the fourth consecutive semester, Harvard undergraduates have been forced to select their classes without shopping week; that is, without the opportunity to sample and explore different courses before committing to any of them. Also this spring, for the second consecutive semester, our board sorely feels the loss of Harvard’s most delightful scheduling quirk.

We miss shopping week — and we aren’t alone.

Last term, in a markedly decisive referendum, 96.46 percent of undergraduate voters voted to reinstate what was once a celebrated part of Harvard’s academic culture. The lopsided result wasn’t exactly unexpected, not for anyone loosely acquainted with students’ love for shopping week. In the past, 62 percent of our undergraduate peers have named shopping week as being significant in their decision to attend Harvard — a misleading if decisive factor, it now seems. Even our administration once touted the tradition as “priceless,” boasting about its merits within Harvard’s official news outlet and publishing a detailed, student-written ‘ode to shopping week’ on the University domain.

The hype was well warranted. Shopping week’s upsides have long been apparent to students, who frequently used the time to browse new and exciting courses without the commitment (and corollary anxiety) of having to enroll before setting foot in the class. In doing so, it offered Harvard undergraduates the rare opportunity to step, or at least peek, outside their comfort zones, to try out new academic endeavors without immediately having to assume any and all grade-related consequences.

Our peers could, for example, figure out whether their winter break fascination with philosophy was in fact worth pursuing or merely symptomatic of an unsustainable Kantian obsession. They could sit-in on friends’ classes only to discover a ‘gem’ hidden in some obscure department distant from their own, or discover courses that, despite lackluster syllabi, were brought to life by brilliant, lesser-known faculty.

Shopping for classes allowed us to try on different masks, to figure out what we wanted to study and who we wanted to be in an institution whose vertiginous pace rarely allows for self reflection. Shopping wasn’t just about how we structured the first few days of class, a logistical detail devoid of importance. Instead, it directly contributed to broadening student perspectives and sparking new interests — both of which are essential to the well-rounded liberal arts education that Harvard claims to embody.

Despite our continuous support of shopping week, we aren’t blind to the difficulties that it poses to faculty and graduate student teaching fellows alike: Not knowing one’s class size, or, worse still, one’s exact terms of employment until a week into the semester is bound to be stressful. The extent to which the new course preview period will benefit those whom shopping week previously burdened, however, is questionable.

Currently, the preview period incentivizes deciding one’s classes based on horribly impersonal course previews and often-revised syllabi. Notably, the new policy also creates its own set of distinct problems: It is not, for example, accessible to students who may have obligations such as work or caring for family members during winter break, students without reliable internet connections at home, students that live in different time zones, or students traveling back to the United States. Even for those lucky enough to have unencumbered access, the course preview period encroaches on the hard-earned break of some of the busiest college bees in the country.

Given these complications, it’s hardly surprising that some students have taken to enrolling in many extra courses, some of which they will later drop, to create their own personal pseudo-shopping week. Others will likely wait until the very end of registration period to finalize their schedules. Yet these responses to the inadequacies of the course preview period seem likely to create exactly the same kind of chaotic uncertainty that made shopping week difficult for faculty and teaching fellows in the first place.

The only difference? Many professors assign work, give quizzes, make students purchase course materials, and critically, begin the process of sectioning classes in their first week. All of these realities make transferring classes, even in the first week, far from seamless — and decidedly not stress-free.

If Harvard cares about the needs of its students and its faculty, it must engage with community stakeholders to carefully and transparently study the benefits and disadvantages of shopping week, as well as the effects of the course preview period. While the suggestion to move course registration to the end of the previous semester might reduce uncertainty for faculty and teaching staff, it would place immense stress on students preparing for finals and distract classes they still have not finished. The suspension of a key Harvard tradition demands, at a minimum, a temporary alternative that is genuinely beneficial for all involved. We don’t believe course registration should be a zero-sum tug-of-war between students and faculty.

We do believe, however, that education at Harvard should be a positive-sum experience in which we are able to continuously learn and improve — shopping week helped us do just that.

This staff editorial solely represents the majority view of The Crimson Editorial Board. It is the product of discussions at regular Editorial Board meetings. In order to ensure the impartiality of our journalism, Crimson editors who choose to opine and vote at these meetings are not involved in the reporting of articles on similar topics.

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