Dissent: On General Education, the Editorial Board Can’t Have It Both Ways

Have you ever met anyone at Harvard who has taken five General Education courses?

It’s a rhetorical question, of course. Gen Eds, as they currently exist, are seen less as enriching academic opportunities and more as mandatory hurdles — no student at the College would ever enroll in more of these courses than they are actually required to take. Students don’t take Gen Eds out of curiosity or intellectual passion — they take them because they must.

Remarkably, the Editorial Board acknowledges all of these shortcomings — which is why their proposal to dilute Gen Eds, rather than dispose of them, completely misses the mark.

They recommend maintaining General Education classes but allowing the requirements to be fulfilled by divisional distributions outside of the program. This empty “reform” neglects the crux of the problem: Students simply don’t want to take the existing Gen Eds. Expanding academic flexibility won’t suddenly make the remaining Gen Eds appealing; it will make them obsolete.

If the goal is to phase out Gen Eds, then do that. The Board would prefer to water down requirements and preserve the system in some moribund form, ostensibly for its own sake. Instead of reckoning with the root causes of student disengagement, my Editorial colleagues take the worst of both worlds, maintaining Gen Eds as an empty formality.

Additionally, the Board’s call to continue allowing each student to enroll in one Gen Ed pass-fail undermines their idea that these courses are necessary for a well-rounded education and authentic intellectual engagement.

Students almost exclusively take Gen Eds to fulfill a requirement. The objective of forcing students to engage with new disciplines runs directly counter to the pass-fail option, which enables students to coast through without applying significant effort. If interdisciplinary learning is truly the aim, students should be expected to genuinely learn — not take an easy class on an even easier grading basis, gaining the bare minimum.

Conversely, the argument that students avoid otherwise appealing Gen Eds for fear of bad grades, thus making the pass-fail option desirable, doesn’t hold. Gen Eds are already generally designed for those without prior experience, making them among the least demanding courses at Harvard. Students don’t avoid them due to GPA concerns — they do so because they find their content irrelevant.

Gen Eds are either essential for academic exploration or they’re not. If, as the Board claims, they are, pass-fail grading undermines that goal. If they aren’t, why bother keeping them around?

Personally, I believe the Gen Ed Program has failed. But, its official demise should not occur through subterfuge — ignominiously siphoning away their influence via some abstruse scheme involving divisional distributions — as the Board suggests.

If GenEds are to end, let them be abolished outright. And if Gen Eds are to remain, let’s at least commit to taking them seriously — starting with a letter grade.

Isaac R. Mansell ’26, a Crimson Editorial editor, is a Statistics concentrator in Kirkland House

Dissenting Opinions: Occasionally, The Crimson Editorial Board is divided about the opinion we express in a staff editorial. In these cases, dissenting board members have the opportunity to express their opposition to staff opinion