All the World’s a Stage — Harvard’s Curriculum Included

I started acting when I was eight. It was, in many ways, the defining moment of my life. I discovered something that I was deeply passionate about, which I’d dedicate a good deal of my life to. Acting was a tool for dealing with strong, percussive emotions, and for understanding myself and the world around me.

The prospect of being able to explore disciplines like Philosophy, Government, and History while still participating in the arts and growing as an artist attracted me to a liberal arts education. But when I arrived at Harvard, known for its exceptional opportunities in the liberal arts, I was shocked by the lack of attention paid to the ‘arts’ part of that curriculum.

In the study of what it means to be human, we’ve forgotten perhaps its most defining characteristic: the propensity for creativity. To receive a degree signifying completion of a liberal arts education at Harvard, students are never required to write a story, perform on stage, or pick up an instrument.

Students who do participate in the arts often confine their creative talents to extracurricular activities, which are largely viewed not as educational opportunities, but as outlets for those who are already proficient. Instead, all students should be required to take a creative arts class.

I know. It’s a tall ask. But I think it’s foundationally important.

Performance is highly personal, and affects your mind in a way meaningfully distinct from analysis. It’s a crucial tool to help understand both yourself and the art that you’re performing.

When I was in high school, I spent three weeks hastily memorizing, rehearsing, and performing “Hamlet.” It was all-consuming; I was thinking about the prince almost every minute of every day. That forced interrogation gave me a much deeper understanding and appreciation of Shakespeare’s words in a way that nothing else could ever have. Nothing makes you understand Hamlet’s emotional turmoil in his “To be, or not to be” monologue more than being dead tired running over the same tragic scenes over and over, forcing yourself to be visibly miserable, staining your clothes with sweat and tears.

More than that, performing gave me a deeper understanding of myself. It helped me understand my own struggles with depression and hopelessness. It forced me to interrogate parts of myself I would rather forget about: the parts of myself that found catharsis in Hamlet’s screaming and mentally ill ramblings. It gave me a deeper, more nuanced view of the complex world that I live in.

And that enveloping experience is not unique to me. It’s the same kind of experience my friend Veronica F. Leahy ’23 had while writing and performing her senior thesis, “American Tonic.” Her concert, in my view, was as much an anthropological project as a musical showcase, trying to document what it means to live with Type 1 diabetes. Seeped in the language of jazz, Leahy wrote music that was often harsh, uncomfortable, and angry, yet interlaced with joy and hope. Interspersed were interviews with figures such as activists, peers, and childhood friends. The performance seemed more than just an attempt to document, but an attempt to understand the disease that’s plagued her for most of her life. Writing and performing, for Leahy, helped her understand herself as much as it helped others understand the experience of living with chronic illness.

But art is often extremely difficult, reliant on years and years of experience. That’s one frequent criticism of requiring participation in the arts. Many students may feel as though they’re not suited to performance, and that a lack of innate ‘talent’ and the many years of dedicated practice required to improve would cause any art classes they take to hurt their GPA, stopping them from getting anything meaningful out of the experience.

These arguments are well taken. Art is difficult. But the goal of the liberal arts is to push you out of your comfort zone. This kind of education is supposed to be hard, and you should be exploring things you’ve never done and may never do again. It’s also supposed to force you to do things you may not intrinsically want to — that’s the whole point of the liberal arts. It’s what makes education special.

Harvard prides itself on liberal arts, but has let a key aspect of that mission slip through their fingers. The College, as part of their divisional distribution requirements, should separate the Arts and Humanities, forcing students to take at least one of each.

The new distributional Arts courses should be focused on creative writing, acting, musical composition, musical performance, physical art, and design, offering students a broad range of options given their areas of interest. This will allow students to be as invested as possible, and make it so every student is creating something in a field they find at least somewhat enjoyable. This gives them the autonomy to choose their own paths through the arts, while ensuring that they aren’t missing out on that foundational part of their education.

Creativity is a fundamental part of being, and a crucial tool in understanding art, self, and environment. It’s ridiculous that Harvard almost entirely ignores it. As Shakespeare wrote, “All the world’s a stage.” It’s about time we treated it like one.

Vander O. B. Ritchie ’26, a Crimson Editorial editor, lives in Matthews Hall.