Reclaiming Our Curriculum

With the recent issuing of the Harvard College curricular review report, the second and most important stage of the College’s first review in three decades has begun. Many potential changes to the curriculum are on the table; in the next year, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) will debate and eventually vote on any and all of them. FAS is required to consider and approve curricular changes—and yet as students, directly affected by whatever changes come to the curriculum, we lack anything approaching this power. Our opinion has been consulted—indeed, I was one of eight students who sat on the curricular review committees this year—but it has become clear that if students want to be equal partners with faculty and administrators in shaping the future of Harvard, we must take organized action.

For the curricular review to be a true success, the student body as a whole must be included in the process. In the end, students must feel ownership over the new curriculum, feel that Harvard is truly ours. This is crucial for two reasons. First, as with any product, the best way to improve Harvard’s education is to ask the customer—in this case, students. Secondly, even the best curricular legislation alone will not lead to a successful curriculum: students need to support any changes for them to be integrated smoothly. Indeed, many prominent problems of the current curriculum—like the mutual distance between students and faculty—can only be solved with active student involvement.

The curricular review process has thus far lacked transparency. Eight student representatives have not been enough for the entire student body to feel involved. One year ago, the administration convened four working groups, consisting of Faculty, administrators and students, which were charged with rewriting Harvard’s curriculum. The members of the group were expected not to openly discuss the proposals of their groups until the final report was issued at the end of last month. While this allowed for a controlled and uninterrupted process, the review did not benefit from the two major advantages of widespread student input—student ideas and student support. Instead, the eight curricular review representatives were left stranded, trying to intuit the opinions of 6,500 other individuals. The rest of the student body, meanwhile, was kept in the dark, only to be thrown onto the defensive when the report finally emerged.

While the April 26 report heads in the right direction on many fronts, it is clear from the report that students were not equal partners. One of the most important issues that the review fails to address is the power dynamic between students and the rest of the University. Currently students are consumers of education; they should be partners in their own educational experience. The process of deciding what classes are offered, how they are taught and even what concentrations are available should be an ongoing dialogue, not a top-down decision. And the curriculum should be an organic and continually evolving entity—perhaps not requiring complete, time-consuming overhauls every 30 years or so.

Dean of the Faculty William C. Kirby, in a letter addressed to his colleagues announcing the release of the report, seems to agree with this fundamental point. Kirby quotes James O. Freedman, who wrote that “Liberal education teaches the importance of tempering profound convictions with a measure of tolerance and a judicious sense of humility.” “If this is true,” Kirby continues in the letter, “then students and faculty must truly engage one another, close up, and not at a distance.” If Kirby truly shares the vision of liberal education as a “shared struggle of faculty and students alike” within the classroom, as I believe he does, I hope he will include students as equal partners.

In a move never before undertaken at Harvard, nor to our knowledge at any other college, Undergraduates Reclaiming Our Curriculum (UROC) has been formed to ensure students are invested to the same degree as the Faculty and administration while evaluating curricular changes during the coming years. UROC is a broad-based coalition, including curricular review representatives and leaders of the Black Men’s Forum; the Association of Black Harvard Women; Fuerza Latina; the Asian American Association; the Bisexual, Gay, Lesbian, Transgender and Supporters Alliance; the Harvard College Democrats; Citystep; the Committee on Undergraduate Education; and the Undergraduate Council. UROC pledges to change the terms of education not just at Harvard, but the international landscape of higher education as well. We understand this report to be a first draft and starting point in a long process of discussion and decision-making; we are announcing, then, that students no longer choose to be simply clients at this school, but rather partners who have a shared investment in determining the future experience of undergraduates at Harvard. As a first step, UROC is proud to sponsor a survey, written by the student curricular review representatives, with the end goal of understanding, synthesizing and advocating a united student agenda. The survey can be found at http://poll.icommons.harvard.edu/poll/taker/pollTakerOpen.jsp?poll=1-2624-88605. We invite any and all interested students to join us.

Joseph K. Green ’05, a social studies concentrator in Kirkland House, was a member of the Harvard College Curricular Review’s pedagogy committee. He is also the co-founder of Undergraduates Reclaiming Our Curriculum.