HUA Members Praise Faculty Vote to Reject Earlier Course Add Deadline

Updated: Wednesday, March 6 at 11:18 p.m.

Members of the Harvard Undergraduate Association praised the Faculty of Arts and Sciences for voting on Tuesday to reject a proposal moving up the deadline for adding classes to the third Monday of the semester.

Last week, the HUA encouraged students to fill out an academic freedom petition indicating whether they approved of the proposal to move up the deadline for adding courses. The survey also asked students to describe how adding courses later in the semester affected their academic experiences.

In an interview with The Crimson on Wednesday, HUA Co-President John S. Cooke ’25 said that of nearly 350 responses to the survey, 95 percent disapproved of the proposal. He said most responses included anecdotes on student experiences with adding and dropping classes.

“We’ve got students saying things such as, ‘Well, I wasn’t a declared concentrator, I was just trying to experiment with classes to see which one worked for me, and that having that flexibility of adding a new class later on in the semester really helped me discover what I want to study,’” Cooke said.

After the petition closed, Cooke said the HUA sent emails to faculty members and Dean of Undergraduate Education Amanda J. Claybaugh — who presented the proposal to the faculty — asking to postpone the vote on the proposal to move up the deadline to add courses.

“We originally asked Dean Claybaugh to postpone the vote on this particular issue, until we have more student feedback and students can actually be included in those conversations,” Cooke said.

“But we’re glad that the faculty we were able to reach out to and talk to about this eventually led to the proposal being voted down,” he added.

Cooke also praised a separate faculty vote to extend the deadline to switch to a pass-fail grading basis until the eleventh Monday of the term.

Though Eunice S. Chon ’25-’26 — an HUA Academic Project Leader and a member of the FAS Committee on Undergraduate Education — said she was pleased with the vote, she criticized the HUA co-presidents’ description of the petition as an “academic freedom” petition, rather than a petition about academic exploration or discovery.

“The co-presidents ultimately misrepresented the proposal by calling it an ‘Academic Freedom’ petition,” added HUA Academic Officer and Chon’s brother Peter E. Chon ’26.

But Cooke said the choice of wording was justified and that adding courses does concern academic freedom.

“I think the language is pretty apt,” he said. “It is an issue of academic freedom, when students find after the first week of school that they are locked into the classes that they might have selected in the previous semester, four months before the classes actually start.”

Eunice Chon said she has utilized the opportunity to add courses late in the semester in the past.

“I have added and dropped courses on the last day possible for three of the semesters I have attended Harvard because I can best gauge my academic bandwidth or semester once I’ve gotten feedback on the first paper or exam in a class,” Chon said.

“If I hadn’t had the opportunity to change my schedule with this flexibility, I wouldn’t have been able to stumble into a fashion philosophy course freshman year or discover my love for Human Evolutionary Biology last year,” she added.

She added that it is not Harvard’s role to determine “what setting students up for success looks like.”

“I think Harvard’s job should be incentivizing academic exploration for students to discover their interests and own them to the extent and in the way that they want,” Chon said. “But it’s not Harvard’s job to set them up for what they think is success.”

—Staff writer Cam N. Srivastava can be reached at cam.srivastava@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @camsrivastava.

—Staff writer William Y. Tan can be reached at william.tan@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @william_y_tan.