Laggard No More

This past week, Computer Science 50 instructor David J. Malan ’99 confirmed that Yale will offer a version of Harvard’s renowned introductory computer science class beginning in the fall of 2015. Students at Yale will have the opportunity to watch videos of lectures conducted at Harvard, while sections and office hours will be held in New Haven. Further integration will be achieved by holding joint Puzzle Days and hackathons, and current CS50 TF Jason C. Hirschhorn ’14-’15 will assume a full-time position at Yale to oversee the implementation of the course.

We are glad that Harvard students are afforded access to a class so compelling that it is being exported to another school. That one of Harvard’s peer institutions views CS50 and its cutting-edge pedagogical approach as a desirable alternative to an in-house introductory course should be taken as an affirmation of the University’s progress in undergraduate education. This joint project should serve as a rebuttal to suggestions that Harvard places too little emphasis on quality instruction at the college level. In fact, it is Yale students who may suffer when enrolled in an imported course whose primary teacher will not be present (even if Hirschhorn’s talents may make up for some the loss).

This decision also represents a victory for computer science at Harvard, and for the sciences on campus more generally. Harvard has historically lagged giants in the field such as MIT and Stanford, and to be sure, neither of those schools is importing CS50. But this year, CS50 logged record-breaking enrollment and surpassed N. Gregory Mankiw’s Economics 10 as the most popular course on campus. That, along with the collaboration with Yale, indicates that Harvard has begun to make strides in the field—and a recent gift by Steven A. Ballmer ’77 should propel computer science at the faculty level, too.

This new partnership with Yale also promises to further the mission of Harvard’s edX program to make courses more widely available to those outside the university. This particular project, however, demonstrates that Harvard is capable of offering remote instruction that is on par with courses taught in-person at other prestigious universities. Recently, we have been critical of the exceptional, unique treatment CS50 has received from the Administration in areas like dual enrollment and academic dishonesty. Hopefully, though, this latest move by CS50 will not prove an exception, and will instead reflect broader, ongoing progress. We applaud the strides that Harvard has made both to increase the competitiveness of its science programs and to offer high-quality online courses, and hope that the university’s reputation in these areas will only continue to improve.