Students Petition To Save Citations

Students concerned that the College’s certificate and citation programs may be on the curricular review’s chopping block have started a petition urging administrators not to dismantle Harvard’s alternative to minors.

Faculty and administrators on the curricular review’s concentrations committee said yesterday that they have discussed the certificate and citation programs, but they are a long way away from making any recommendations.

The petitioners—who have addressed their letter to Dean of the College Benedict H. Gross ’71—are specifically concerned with the fate of the health care policy certificate, one of several such acknowledgments of extensive work in a particular area of study.

Candidates for the health care policy certificate say that rumors have been buzzing among people in their program that the review may eliminate certificates and citations.

Jordan D. Bohnen ’05 addressed two classes—General Education 186, “Introduction to Health Care Policy” and Quantitative Reasoning 24, “Health Economics”—yesterday in hopes of rallying support and signatures for the effort.

“There’s a petition for anyone in the certificate program to sign,” said Bohnen, who is a candidate for the health care policy certificate. “It’s a petition to the College, asking them not to cancel the program.”

Certificates are not officially recognized by the University but are offered by Faculty committees in fields as diverse as Latin American Studies and Mind, Brain and Behavior. The University does recognize foreign language citations, which were approved by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences in 1998.

Members of the curricular review committee say they have not specifically targeted the certificate programs.

“We’ve talked a little bit about certificates and the language citation and more generally about the idea of minors and other ways of collecting work together, but we haven’t talked about any particular program,” said John T. O’Keefe, assistant dean of the College and a member of the curricular review working group on concentrations. “It’s not the case, at least at this stage, where we’re talking about doing away with any particular thing. We’re a ways away from making a recommendation about it.”

Professor of Psychology Mahzarin Banaji, another member of the committee, said that consideration of certificates is only in its preliminary stages.

“There is a sense that when somebody does something like invests in a language very deeply, there should be some recognition of it, but there is by no means clarity that giving a certificate or other kind of paper is advantageous,” she said.

The certificate in health policy program is quite young—it was established just five years ago, according to Jane A. Lowe ’04, who is enrolled in the program.

“We had 13 new students join in September, we had 70 at our intro meeting at the beginning of the year, and it’s something we all really feel should continue,” she said.

The letter will be circulated over the next few days and delivered to Gross sometime in the near future, the petition’s organizers said.

—Staff writer Laura L. Krug can be reached at krug@fas.harvard.edu.