Concentrate Harder

The Harvard College Curricular Review is nearing one of its many milestones today. At yesterday’s meeting, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences discussed the proposals of the Educational Policy Committee (EPC), which has been tasked with exploring changes to Harvard’s concentration structure. Its report suggests that changes in the fundamentals of a Harvard education are brewing. The EPC proposed sweeping changes to the structure of concentrations such as moving concentration declaration to the middle of sophomore year, reducing requirements, and introducing the possibility of a “secondary field,” which would be similar to minors offered at other colleges. We applaud the effort to make concentrations less constraining, but we disagree with some of the specific measures proposed.

First, we disagree with the EPC’s logic in recommending that concentration choice be delayed an extra semester. Moving concentration declaration from the end of freshman year to the middle of sophomore year will limit student choice and hinder many concentrations in exchange for a dubious set of benefits. It is true that freshmen schedules are restricted by the need to fulfill their language requirements and complete Expos, and the EPC has argued that students need more time to thoroughly explore fields of potential interest. Another undecided semester would provide that, and it would allow ample contact with upperclassmen who can better inform concentration choices. That said, the downsides to changing the concentration deadline far outnumber these advantages. Not only will students be left another semester without a dedicated concentration adviser, they also risk frittering away more of their Harvard experience taking a motley lot of classes without sufficiently considering how to unify their interests. Moving concentration declaration to the middle of sophomore year would also inhibit the flow of study in concentrations that rely on a full-year sophomore tutorial.

The best way for the EPC to promote flexibility in concentrations is to reduce the total number of requirements, not delay the date of concentration choice. As such, we endorse the EPC’s proposal to limit the number of courses required for concentrations (honors and non-honors) to 12, with exceptions made for highly technical fields (Engineering, for example) and interdisciplinary study. Twelve courses, which will comprise about 40 percent of a student’s undergraduate course load, should allow students to become experts in a particular field while granting them the freedom to pursue a truly diverse liberal arts education. And quality, not quantity, of study should determine students’ ultimate honors recommendations.

Selective adoption of the EPC’s proposals will allow students to gain from increased flexibility while retaining the benefits of access to concentration advising and concentration tutorials in the first semester of the sophomore year. And with fewer requirements, students will find it less difficult to switch concentrations after the first semester of their sophomore years or at any time during their Harvard careers. For example, if a student decides on anthropology at the end of her freshman year, she can still easily switch to history the next spring. With fewer requirements, she will be able to make up for the missed tutorial in her junior year. At the same time, she can get an insider’s feel for anthropology in her first semester in the department, as she will have access to concentration advisers, House tutors, and fellow anthropology concentrators.

Moving from major to minor, the EPC’s idea of instituting a “secondary field” seems outwardly appealing. Theoretically, these fields could work like the Language Citation program, allowing students to get credit for in-depth work in a non-concentration field. The EPC suggests that students can take four to six classes in a field outside their concentration to merit a certificate in a secondary field. While the benefits are obvious, we can foresee a time when graduating with a secondary field certificate becomes the norm and students who take a truly diverse array of courses (but not enough for a secondary field) would seem somehow inferior coming out of college. Adding six courses for a secondary field to the twelve the EPC recommends for a concentration will make plans of study more rigid then they are even now. With the EPC’s cap on requirements, the door is already open for students to take more courses than before on topics of secondary interest. The formality of a certificate will pressure many students to pursue a secondary interest half-heartedly. In this case, more flexibility is too much of a good thing.

Unfortunately for the future of the EPC’s proposals, professors in many science concentrations are already up in arms about the recommendation to reduce requirements. As science concentrations seem to be the main target for these recommendations (along with honors tracks), this doesn’t bode well. Clearly, the success of the EPC’s proposal to cap requirements—the only one of its recommendations we support—will hinge on the successful implementation of an exemption procedure. For future drafts, the EPC should flesh out this procedure with an eye towards placating its critics. But it must not sacrifice the main goal of the proposal, as fewer concentration requirements would have broad-ranging positive effects for all Harvard students.