Secondary Fields Will Narrow Undergraduate Education

To the editors:



Re: “Faculty Approves Secondary Fields,” news, Apr. 5.

I was genuinely surprised to see the faculty approve secondary fields for Harvard undergraduates. Secondary fields strike at the underlying premise of Harvard students’ education: that they should be students of the world and not of select disciplines.

A discipline is a perspective. It is meant to be a tool or lens, with which we decipher and study the world around us—it is not to be studied exclusively in itself. No wonder, Harvard’s long-time insistence on joint concentrations disallowed the pursuit of two fields in separation. What is important is not the fields in themselves but the perspective we gain from them (with multidisciplinary exposure simply meaning broader perspective), and so, under the old structure, joint concentrators were forced to make connections between their interests.

Now, by shifting the emphasis from gaining perspective to gaining compartmentalized sets of knowledge, secondary fields will narrow a student’s intellect, not broaden it.



SARITHA KOMATIREDDY ’05

Washington, D.C.

April 6, 2006



The writer was a Crimson editorial editor.