A Liberal Arts Education Without the Arts

Harvard is supposed to be a liberal arts institution — but the arts are getting the short end of the stick.

Recently, a faculty committee released a report suggesting that many students prioritize extracurriculars over their courses. I, for one, am unsurprised. In my experience, student-run extracurriculars supplement Harvard’s academic deficits, particularly in theater, music, dance, and journalism. As it stands, students often invest in these activities as if they were a 5th class. If Harvard wants courses to compete with these clubs, they must strengthen arts offerings in the classroom.

When I’m not writing for The Crimson, I am on the executive board of the Harvard-Radcliffe Dramatic Club, a primary theater organization on campus. I have both acted and written for the entirety of my time at Harvard. These activities aren’t merely for fun or important for pre-professional development — they constitute a vital aspect of my liberal arts education.

As I have written before, the arts are an indispensable and often overlooked part of Harvard’s liberal arts project. They teach us to be empathetic and encourage us to engage with the world through the perspective of other people.

Evidently, Harvard has previously recognized the importance of the arts. Former University President Drew Gilpin Faust has said that a liberal arts education that embraces the arts alongside the humanities and sciences is “at the core of Harvard’s philosophy of undergraduate education.” In 2007, Faust announced a task force on the arts, which produced a report recommending sweeping changes to the undergraduate curriculum.

The report noted that extracurriculars have long maintained the arts on campus, citing the “ambitious offerings of the Harvard-Radcliffe Dramatic Club,” alongside the Harvard Dance Program and the many student-run magazines. At the same time, the report bluntly stated that Harvard courses provide “pitifully few means” for students to develop artistic skills, “as if aspiring artists should either have come to Harvard already in possession of most of what they need or should be able easily to find what they need outside of the classroom.”

The response to these findings has been mixed. The Theatre, Dance, and Media concentration — which was founded in 2015, partially in response to the report — likely lacks much of the funding, resources, and agency that it would receive as a full department. Similarly, the Art, Film, and Visual Studies department caps most courses and would benefit from more resources.

I’ve heard students and faculty alike express frustration with how the subjects are jammed together, where one concentration covers playwriting, screenwriting, acting, dance, lighting, direction, sound design, scene design, and more. Furthermore, theatre performances classes can be difficult to get into, often requiring auditions or applications.

The Harvard-Radcliffe Dramatic Club hosts hundreds of students and puts up around eight productions every semester (including many student-written) and the Hasty Pudding Theatricals, the oldest theatrical organization in America, tours every year, while Harvard’s TDM website suggests it hasn’t put up any productions for two semesters in a row.

Meanwhile, students continue to write for publications like this very paper, which boasts nearly 400 editors, while Harvard offers only a handful of dedicated journalistic writing courses a year.

Harvard cannot have it both ways. It cannot rely on extracurriculars to fill curricular gaps and simultaneously decry students for prioritizing those activities over their classes. The College must accept that extracurriculars provide an outsized value for students in pursuit of a true liberal arts education, or it must work to bolster offerings in the arts.

A good start would be increasing funding for the departments already in place. Harvard should create an approach which blends creating art and studying it, and should consider making TDM a full department (as opposed to a stand-alone concentration) while expanding and possibly breaking up the concentrations of TDM and AFVS so students can focus on specific artistic mediums. The University must also increase the number of staff in these departments so they have the professors to adequately meet student demand.

If, instead, Harvard continues to rely on clubs, the University must provide financial and instrumental resources so students can spend less time fundraising for their clubs and more time participating in them — and, in turn, their classes. Harvard should also foster relationships between some of the largest student-run organizations and their corresponding academic departments to encourage pedagogical exchange.

Students should prioritize their school work, and the alarm which many faculty express at academic disengagement is completely understandable. It is undeniable that we are facing a real, substantial problem with students who do not act like they are students.

But Harvard cannot be surprised if some students feel more fulfilled by their extracurricular commitments when those clubs fill crucial gaps in Harvard’s curriculum — in subjects administrators have declared an important part of a liberal arts education.

If we want students to return to the classroom, give them the classes they want.

Vander O.B. Ritchie ’26, a Crimson Editorial editor, is a History and Philosophy concentrator in Leverett House.