Harvard Has To Make Up Its Mind About General Education

There's a big issue with the Harvard College General Education program, and it's pretty apparent to anyone involved: Students just aren’t that engaged.

And Harvard seems to know it. At a Faculty of Arts and Sciences meeting earlier this month, professors expressed broad support for a proposal to eliminate the option for College students to fulfill one of their four Gen Ed requirements on a pass-fail grading basis, apparently hoping that the change will help refocus the program.

But if the faculty is really serious about fixing General Education, the supposed “crown jewel of a student’s education,” according to one professor, they’ll need to do far more.

The problem is that the Gen Ed program is tasked with providing a rigorous introduction to the liberal arts while being flexible enough for students to explore different fields — but it can’t do both at once. If Harvard hopes to accomplish either goal, deepening rigor or increasing flexibility, it needs to choose just one.

As it stands, the center of a Harvard undergraduate’s education is their chosen concentration. That’s because concentration requirements and electives typically account for far more of one’s courses than the College-wide curriculum. This approach makes sense — students should take classes in the fields they are most interested in.

But Harvard should also adequately expose students to the diverse set of disciplines that make up a liberal arts education. Its current mishmash of requirements are failing this task.

Alongside the College's basic requirements in Expository Writing, Foreign Language, and Quantitative Reasoning with Data, there are two systems it uses to promote breadth: Divisional Distribution requirements, which force students to take classes in each of the three main divisions of the FAS, and Gen Ed requirements, which require students to take particular classes in four specific interdisciplinary categories, like Ethics and Civics or Aesthetics and Culture.

Neither, however, has succeeded at capturing the general specificity needed for their courses to be informative and yet engaging.

The first issue with Gen Eds is that they aren’t really all that general. Most courses in the program seem overly specialized, covering issues that fit best within the narrow scope of a postdoctoral paper, rather than a broad survey course. For instance, although analyzing 19th and 20th-century theories of Islamic governance in the Middle East may be compelling to me personally, it hardly belongs in the category of general education.

This specialization, coupled with the limited number of courses available to fulfill each requirement, has created a system where it is often difficult to find engaging Gen Eds. The next best option is often to take the easiest, albeit uninteresting, courses possible. Thus, student enthusiasm for Gen Eds is low and classroom engagement suffers.

Further, Divisional Distribution requirements have been rendered basically obsolete by how easy they are to fulfill. For example, the Science, Engineering, and Applied Science requirement can be fulfilled by classes in far adjacent fields like Chinese, while a course in photography can complete the humanities requirement. Many social science students conceivably don't have to venture outside of their concentration to complete most of their distribution requirements.

If Harvard wants to recenter the liberal arts in the education it provides, one option could be to demand some broader standards for academic competency. Currently, the only College-wide hard skills necessary to graduate are writing and some amount of foreign language and math proficiency. Requiring students to prove competency in calculus, physics, or take some kind of survey humanities course by the time they leave would not be so unreasonable.

Indeed, these standards could help students who previously lacked strong STEM or humanities instruction to gain that base of knowledge, making sure nobody is left behind. Meanwhile, those who finished many of those requirements in high school could test out of them, freeing themselves from the current slog of College requirements.

Another option would be to emulate the open curriculum system used at Brown University and simply eliminate all requirements, except that of expository writing and concentration courses. This system would allow for more academic exploration and probably improve classroom engagement. However, it would be an admission of defeat in the College’s attempt to construct a traditional liberal arts curriculum for its students, as a given student’s prescribed curriculum could be entirely specialized to their concentration.

In either case, the Gen Ed and divisional distribution system needs a change, because, as of now, it occupies an annoying middle ground; too weak to be relevant, too strong to be innocuous.

On General Education, Harvard just can’t have it both ways.

Henry F. Haidar ’28, a Crimson Editorial editor, lives in Wigglesworth Hall.