GenEds Have the Right Idea. Here’s Why We Should Abolish Them Anyway.

Harvard’s General Education program has been a staple of College students’ liberal arts education for decades. But it must go — not because its goals are wrong, but because it’s the wrong way to achieve them.

The GenEd requirement aims to introduce students to a diversity of fields. But with department-specific courses so often more engaging and rigorous, there’s an even better place to find a myriad of diverse, specialized courses: the rest of Harvard’s course catalog.

Many GenEds end up being throw-away classes. Sure, some students are ecstatic to take “Psychotherapy and the Modern Self” or “The Ancient Greek Hero” — but many sign up only because they have to tick a box. We end up picking the better of a handful of evils, registering for the GenEd we find the least uninteresting.

How many students have sat in the back of a lecture hall in the Science Center or Sever Hall, half-asleep and perhaps having a philosophical reflection on their disillusionment with this class rather than the subject matter in front of them?

The problem isn’t the College’s commitment to a comprehensive liberal arts education — Harvard should certainly encourage students to take classes outside their comfort zones. But the GenEd system — despite its goals — actually does the opposite.

One problem is that the variable difficulty of GenEds enables students to hunt for an easy A: minimal effort “gems” that they hope to treat as a study hall to work on their Math 21 p-set. From light reading loads to lax attendance requirements, low expectations diminish the value students get from classes that have the potential to be quite engaging.

The other major problem is the breadth of the courses available. To Harvard’s credit, unlike Columbia University’s Core Curriculum, which gives all students the same broad overview of the humanities, GenEd courses are specialized — from “The Global Heart Disease Epidemic: Stopping What We Started” to “Popular Culture and Modern China.” But the College isn’t doing all it could to deliver on that goal, frustratingly restricting students to just a few dozen options per semester to satisfy these breadth requirements.

A liberal arts education should be intellectually stimulating and engaging. GenEd professors try their best, but their efforts are stifled by a system that drives many students to take classes they simply aren’t interested in.

The solution? Replace the General Education curriculum with more distribution requirements — similar to Yale’s.

Replace the Aesthetics & Culture requirement with a requirement to take an English or Religion class, the Histories, Societies, Individuals requirement with a requirement to take a course in History or Government, and so on. Or perhaps even reconsider what areas we want to have as part of this College-enforced multifaceted education in the first place.

This idea is not entirely novel. Harvard at one time allowed some students to substitute departmental courses to fulfill GenEd requirements. The current distribution requirements effectively push students to take classes outside their comfort zone without limiting them to the comparatively short list of GenEds. Replacing GenEds with additional distribution requirements would better promote true academic breadth without making the College’s requirements any more burdensome.

This would also allow students to more seriously explore fields they are interested in outside of their major — a STEM double concentrator who only has space to take one humanities course should be able to take an English seminar on Toni Morrison if they so desire, rather than be forced to pick from a handful of Aesthetics & Culture GenEds.

Under this model, popular GenEds would go back to the departments where they belong. Star professors like Government professor Michael J. Sandel — who teaches a popular GenEd introduction to ethics — should teach introductory classes in their own departments that can be taken by concentrators and non-concentrators alike. A perfect example is the College’s introductory economics sequence, Economics 10, taught by professors Jason Furman ’92 and David I. Laibson ’88 and taken by hundreds of undergraduates each year.

As Harvard students, we have access to one of the best liberal arts educations in the world. The College has found a balance on the spectrum between the extremes of some of its peers — from Columbia’s standardized Core to Brown’s open curriculum.

Requiring breadth is great, but there’s a better way to do it.

Rohan Nambiar ’27, a Crimson Editorial editor, lives in Leverett House.