Harvard Isn’t a Trade School. It’s a Liberal Arts Institution.

My freshman year, I attended a career chat hosted by a pre-professional club on campus. “The great thing about Harvard,” the speaker said, “is that you really don’t have to go to class.” The twenty or so students in the room nodded enthusiastically. “You’re really here,” she pressed on, “for the connections.”

At the time, I was juggling five clubs, recruiting for jobs two years in advance, and flailing busily in the hamster wheel of campus ambition: the type that considered, above all else, what came after college instead of what was already here.

Classes, naturally, became nothing more than a way to kill time. I’d show up to my seminars woefully unprepared, having skimmed the readings in between internship applications, and raised my hand only to recite what was safe and easy — the talking points I knew my classmates would agree with, the answer I knew my professor would endorse.

I wish that I could say it was just me, but the numbers suggest otherwise. Earlier last month, a faculty report found that many Harvard students don’t prioritize their academics, preferring instead to invest their time in extracurricular activities. The report also cited a 2024 survey where 33 percent of graduating Harvard seniors felt free to express their views on controversial issues.

These two findings aren’t unrelated. They’re symptoms of the same disease: a dangerous apathy hollowing out academic life.

For a pre-professional student, the classroom has a wholly extractive purpose — think of it like a cost-benefit analysis. In one column, we have the rewards of active classroom engagement: the rough drafts, half-formed hypotheses, necessary failures, and the challenge of pushing a discussion beyond its syllabi-sanctioned limits. In the other, we have what might come with this engagement: saying something unpolished, unconventional, or unpopular.

Should we read a paper and draw our own conclusions, or ask ChatGPT to distill takeaways to regurgitate during section? Defend a professor-approved argument for a trusty A, or risk an uncertain — but original — B+? This semester, a classmate told me she took a seminar pass/fail so she could say what she actually believed without putting her grade on the line.

When the safer route is so enticing — the tried-and-true path to academic “success,” where we ask questions with reliable answers and take the answers as immutable truth — is it worth it to take a risk?

Harvard seems to think so. Our University looks to the liberal arts as its guiding philosophy — an education in how to think beyond loyalty to an idea, party, system, or employer. Harvard’s leaders continually point to this ideal in speeches, statements, and pamphlets.

But many students seem to have no stake in this mission. It’s too costly. It doesn’t make sense. It’s incompatible with the world that we’re preparing for.

This is a student body that has abandoned the student project. And the classroom is in free fall.

When we become dispassionate, beliefs go unquestioned. Curiosity gives way to conformity. Classroom discussions become something like quicksand: a sludge of the same talking points and worldviews, stagnant and buzzing with flies, settled too fast and predictably. In the mire, we don’t break new ground. Instead, we all advance in lockstep towards a trade — tech, finance, law, consulting — and leave behind what we came here for in the first place.

To become students again, we need to be able to entertain an idea without immediately calculating its professional utility. We need to realize that becoming more engaged in the classroom is an essential task, even if it comes at the expense of a recommendation letter or a perfect transcript.

The alternative — going four years without learning anything beyond what’s good for the trade, emerging employable but not educated — is a cost we can’t be willing to pay.

Education isn’t simply a credential. It’s not a four-year networking opportunity, or a line on a resume. A true education teaches us not just how to perform, but how to think; not just how to argue, but how to doubt; not just how to succeed, but how to understand what success means.

If we refuse the demands of the classroom and opt for cool indifference, we aren’t really being educated at all. We are just passing through.

Zoe Yu ’27, a Crimson Editorial editor, is a Government concentrator in Pforzheimer House.