Mission Failure

The debate began 40 years ago when the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) approved the first pass-fail option at Harvard. Henry Ford II Professor of Social Science David Riesman ’31 said at the time, “Most students here take too many courses. They chop their emotional energies into too many little bits. We should be encouraging students to play from weakness instead of strength, but the system here puts pressure on the student not to extend himself in areas where he’s awkward because he fears not doing brilliantly.”

The changes allowed students to have one of the usual four half-courses per semester graded pass-fail, excepting requirements like the Core Curriculum. It also delegated concentration credit policy to each department, in an effort to appease faculty wary of students taking too many pass-fail courses, which, at that time, was an effective compromise for addressing a new and revolutionary desire for academic freedom. ,

Unfortunately, Harvard’s pass-fail option has changed little since then. It was revolutionary in 1967, before the introduction of similar programs at some peer institutions like Brown and Princeton, but it is unimpressive today. Though students can supposedly opt for as many pass-fail courses as they want (though rarely more than one per semester), concentration credit policy is still subject to departmental whims.

As an educational luminary that supposedly encourages the pursuit of “veritas,” Harvard’s Faculty should liberalize the pass-fail option by mandating concentration credit policy for pass-fail courses in all departments. Departments should accept any relevant courses for concentration credit—whether those courses are letter-graded or not—with the exception of foundational or introductory courses. Right now, the risk-taking it was meant to encourage remains limited purely to students’ electives, and has little impact on our serious academic pursuits, which all count towards the tyrannical GPA.

Since 1969, Brown University’s New Curriculum has fostered the kind of academic freedom Professor Riesman and others had hoped for at Harvard. Brown allows students to have courses letter-graded or non-letter graded, with a Satisfactory/No Credit option. Through this open curriculum, Brown aims to prioritize “intellectual growth rather than the static transmission of knowledge”—essentially, a broad and curious academic perspective. Admittedly, Brown’s intellectual ethos is historically very different from Harvard’s, but we could nonetheless learn from its exploration-focused, open curriculum.

Most concentrations at the College only grant one or two pass-fail concentration credits, with few exceptions. This allows little opportunity for academic exploration, despite the advantages it would bring. The ability—and desire—to pursue studies in unknown or challenging areas is fundamental to creating the broad and inquisitive perspective necessary for genuine scholarship. Indeed, this is the goal of a liberal arts education, “an education conducted in a spirit of free inquiry undertaken without concern for topical relevance or vocational utility,” as the Task Force on General Education wrote.

In 1945, Harvard College’s Committee on the Objectives of a General Education in a Free Society wrote, “Education […] must uphold at the same time tradition and experiment, the ideal and the means, subserving, like our culture itself, change within commitment.” FAS ignores this credo today, hemming students into low-risk, safety courses—or else leaving us to risk squandering all chance of a good grad school. Only a decisive policy change can resurrect Harvard’s commitment to the pursuit of real scholarship.

Noah M. Silver ’10, a Crimson editorial comper, lives in Weld Hall.