Harvard Is a School. We Need To Go to Class.

It looks like 9 a.m. classes just got a little bit less skippable.

We know it because we’ve done it: At Harvard these days, attending class has become more encouraged than required. In what some faculty have framed as a bid to course correct after the pandemic made online instruction ubiquitous, starting next fall, the College will “in most cases” place undergraduates who miss two weeks of classes on involuntary leaves of absence.

The move comes amid a welcome push to increase academic rigor at the College, and we support it. For most people, an education completed via recorded lecture really wouldn’t be the same. But addressing undergraduates’ sometimes-lax attitude toward their courses requires a broader shift away from a campus culture where academics often play second fiddle to professional aspirations.

Attending class matters. Studies show that attending class in person improves learning outcomes, not least because online student-professor relationships pale in comparison to the real thing. Harvard’s classrooms aim to foster an unparalleled degree of accountability, focus, and engagement that asynchronous learning can rarely replicate.

Missing a few days of class is rarely an issue. But two or more weeks out of a 13-week semester is egregious. It waters down what should be a rigorous, full-time education living and learning with our peers. And while it may sound like a dramatic shift, the new policy seems not much more than a formalization of existing practice.

Still, Harvard must not punish students dealing with crises like health issues or family emergencies. We hope that the College keeps its (seeming) promise to treat such cases with compassion, but it’s not uncommon that policies made with one purpose gradually take on another. As it puts this new rule into practice, administrators should be careful to guard against this kind of concept creep.

More fundamentally, while we welcome Harvard treating the symptom, we would urge it to turn its attention to the underlying disease: the College’s culture of careerism.

Harvard students are ambitious. Much of the appeal of attending our University is the potential to join the ranks of successful alumni. Career-focused extracurriculars — from the Harvard Financial Analysts Club to Tech for Social Good and the Student i-lab startup incubator — thrive because of student demand. Indeed, in some sense, one must be ambitious to end up on the right side of that infamous three percent acceptance rate.

But Harvard is still a school, and in-person, residential education ought to be a central part of the College experience. The new attendance policy is a worthwhile step in that direction, but it’s going to take more than updated attendance policies to restore academics to the center of University life.

Campus-wide we ought to think more deeply about how to structure courses to promote deep student engagement. A good place to start is small but meaningful steps like no-laptop policies, which push students to join in rather than passively multitask during class.

We need a change in undergraduate culture. Education is valuable in and of itself, and — obviously — students should be attending class. As it moves to tighten standards at the College, Harvard will have to do some soul-searching to resolve the tension between the ambition it selects for and the educational experience it desires.

Harvard is more than a credential. It’s a vibrant community of bright, hard-working people brought together to learn together — a place to be challenged, ask questions, and explore. It’s significantly in its classrooms that Harvard trains the future leaders of America. Let’s make sure we show up to them.

This staff editorial solely represents the majority view of The Crimson Editorial Board. It is the product of discussions at regular Editorial Board meetings. In order to ensure the impartiality of our journalism, Crimson editors who choose to opine and vote at these meetings are not involved in the reporting of articles on similar topics.

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