Harvard Needs To Connect the Disciplines

It’s often at least 1:30 a.m. before my roommates and I gather in our common room and have the chance to talk.

Each of us studies something different — one is an English concentrator who’s passionate about comedy and music, the other focuses on engineering and design, and I split my time between biology and statistics. Our late-night conversations make for some of my most enriching experiences at Harvard, and yet, if it weren’t for a chance rooming assignment, they would never take place.

This isn’t an isolated experience, it’s a problem. I find myself spending nearly all my time with friends of similar academic interests, not least because we spend hours in classes, labs, and sections together.

To truly embrace interdisciplinary learning, Harvard should offer more courses that actively integrate multiple fields rather than simply requiring students to take classes outside their concentration.

Many courses cater exclusively to certain concentrations rather than fostering a broader, shared curriculum. For example, Stat 102: Introduction to Statistics for Life Sciences or Stat 104: Introduction to Quantitative Methods for Economics encourage students to cluster with others in their discipline. This separation limits intellectual cross-pollination, making it harder for students to engage meaningfully across fields.

While Harvard’s General Education and divisional distribution requirements are meant to encourage exploration, they often fail to foster true interdisciplinary engagement. Many Gen Ed courses are large, lecture-based, and designed for broad appeal rather than deep study across different disciplines. Meanwhile, divisional requirements push students outside their comfort zones but do little to bridge the gaps between fields in a structured way.

Distributional requirements also present challenges because of workload differences across disciplines. I quickly learned that taking English courses with hundreds of pages of reading before each class was nearly impossible when I was in a chemistry lab until 8:45 p.m. Conversely, my roommate concentrating in English has never had to complete a problem set. These structural differences make it difficult for students to step outside of their primary academic interests, even if they are curious about other fields.

Beyond workload discrepancies, physical separation makes cross-disciplinary study impractical. While I ping-pong between the Northwest Building and the Science Center, my engineering roommate spends most of her time at the Science and Engineering Complex (in a different town, I might add), and my English roommate drifts between the Barker Center and Lamont Library. These geographic limitations are just another deterrent to would-be multidisciplinary students.

A recent University senior survey found that only one-third of students feel comfortable expressing their thoughts about controversial topics in class. While there are surely numerous factors at play, this classroom nonparticipation may partly be due to a lack of comfort engaging with ideas outside their concentrations. More interdisciplinary courses could help foster a culture where students do not feel out of their depth when engaging with unfamiliar subjects, ultimately leading to richer discussions and enriching personal experiences.

Many students choose Harvard for its diverse student body, yet the current curriculum limits interactions between them. The University needs to design courses that deliberately foster interdisciplinary learning beyond the Gen Ed system.

Additionally, Harvard could standardize workload expectations across disciplines. If STEM students complete weekly problem sets while humanities students read a book a week, interdisciplinary courses should offer a mix of assignments to make them more broadly accessible.

Until then, students will continue living in parallel academic universes, tethered only by fleeting late-night conversations.

Sandhya Kumar ’26, a Crimson Editorial editor, is a double concentrator in Molecular & Cellular Biology and Statistics in Winthrop House.