On Survey, Majority of FAS Faculty Say Harvard Undergrads Don’t Care Enough About Their Courses

Two-thirds of professors who responded to The Crimson’s annual survey of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences said they believe Harvard students do not prioritize their courses enough.

The figure puts a number to the weight of concerns in the FAS over an earlier finding, reported by a faculty committee in January, that “many” students are disengaged with their academic curriculum and focus more on pre-professional commitments. Faculty have largely lined up behind a recent push to inject renewed rigor into Harvard College’s classrooms.

The College has begun comparing and adjusting grades across courses and amended its student handbook to include new language asserting that “students are expected to prioritize their coursework.” Faculty have also voted to eliminate the pass-fail options for courses fulfilling several graduating requirements at the College.

The changes were made in response to growing concerns about shifting student priorities, as well as grade inflation. The FAS survey also found faculty are widely concerned that course grading has become too generous, with nearly 90 percent saying they “somewhat” or “strongly agree” that Harvard has a grade inflation problem.

A Harvard spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.

The Crimson’s FAS survey was distributed to more than 1,400 faculty members, including both tenure-track and non-tenure-track faculty, with names collected from the FAS’ public masthead. Faculty were polled on demographic information, politics, and campus issues.

The email survey had 406 responses, with 260 fully completed and 146 partially completed. The survey was open for three weeks, from April 23 to May 12.

This is the fifth installment in a series on the survey results. The preceding pieces covered faculty views on Harvard’s lawsuit challenging the Trump administration, governance, academic freedom, and antisemitism and Islamophobia at Harvard. This installment focuses on faculty perspectives about classroom issues.

Academic Rigor

Faculty were not optimistic about Harvard students’ focus on their academic work, with 31 percent saying they “strongly agree” and 38 percent saying they “somewhat agree” that students should concentrate more on their classes.

In contrast, just 4 percent said they “strongly disagree” and 11 percent said they “somewhat disagree” that Harvard students don’t put enough time into their classes.

These figures suggest that many faculty have experienced the phenomenon described by the Classroom Social Compact Committee in January, which was tasked with reviewing classroom norms and reported in January that many students prioritize their pre-professional commitments over their academics.

“Many Harvard College students do not prioritize their courses and some view extensive extracurricular commitments as a more fulfilling, meaningful, and useful allocation of their time,” the report read. “Most faculty view student curricular disengagement with alarm.”

Faculty aren’t the only ones concerned with the course difficulty at Harvard. The Trump administration has taken aim at the University’s course offerings too, with Secretary of Education Linda E. McMahon bashing Harvard as lacking “any semblance of academic rigor” in a May letter.

Professors and students have disputed McMahon’s claims. They said that though the priorities of Harvard students have certainly changed, they are as intelligent and hardworking as ever. And they defended new classes — like Math MA5: “An In-depth Introduction to Functions and Calculus I” — that aim to provide a firmer foundation for students whose high schools did not offer advanced courses.

Still, the University has lately pushed to make it harder to coast through classes to easy A’s, especially since an October 2023 report identified rampant “grade compression” at the College.

In response to the FAS survey, respondents also expressed concern about this phenomenon. More than half — 59 percent — said they “strongly agree” that grade inflation is a problem, and 29 percent said they “somewhat agree.” Just 2 percent answered that they “strongly disagree” and 4 percent said they “somewhat disagree.”

Respondents also endorsed policies pitched by the faculty committee on classroom norms that aim to make Harvard classes more difficult. Nearly three-quarters — at 74 percent — either “somewhat” or “strongly support” limiting student use of electronic devices and the internet during class. Only 10 percent “somewhat” or “strongly oppose” the proposal, one of many suggested by the committee.

AI in Classrooms

Faculty were also asked about the use of artificial intelligence in academia. Many said they have seen AI in their classrooms, but they were split over whether the technology has improved the classroom experience and how best to respond to its growing presence.

Generative AI has become ubiquitous at Harvard in recent years, impacting the University’s research and teaching ecosystems. Harvard’s AI research labs have received hundreds of millions of dollars in funding from a list of donors that span OpenAI to Mark Zuckerberg. And the Harvard Law School has launched an initiative for studying the intersection of AI and the law.

In the classroom, the Harvard Business School, Medical School, and Kennedy School have all created new courses, some of which are graduation requirements, to educate their students about how AI will shape their fields for years to come.

“As the world of healthcare changes around us, we also need to evolve to respond to that, to prepare our students the best way,” HMS Dean for Medical Education Bernard S. Chang ’93 told The Crimson in October 2024.

Nearly 80 percent of faculty respondents said they had seen coursework they knew or believed to be made using AI: 9 percent said they “frequently” receive such work, 34 percent “sometimes” do, and 36 percent “occasionally” do. A smaller but significant proportion, 22 percent, said they have “never” received AI-assisted work.

But faculty were split over whether the campus boom in AI has helped or hurt their courses. Just over 40 percent said they thought AI has had a “neither positive nor negative” effect, and a similar share said the same for an either “somewhat” or “very negative” impact.

Only 15 percent said the technology has had a “somewhat” or “very positive” effect.

As AI has become increasingly widespread at Harvard, so has using the technology to cheat. In a survey of the Harvard College Class of 2025, 30 percent of graduates said they had submitted AI-generated work as their own, a figure in line with the previous classes.

Faculty largely said they believe they can identify work made with AI. Half said they were “somewhat confident” in their ability to distinguish between AI and non-AI work, while 14 percent said they were “very confident” and 36 percent said they were “not confident.”

Many also seemed willing to discipline students for cheating with AI. About one in 10 said they had referred students to the Honor Council or Administrative Board, the disciplinary body for student misconduct, for using AI to produce their work.

A majority of faculty respondents also bar students from using AI tools in class, to varying degrees. A plurality of 33 percent permit the use of the technology “with some restrictions,” while 20 percent “entirely prohibit” AI and 29 percent allow it but “with strong restrictions.” Just 10 percent have no explicit policy on AI use, and 8 percent “entirely permit” it.

Methodology

The Crimson’s annual faculty survey for 2025 was conducted via Qualtrics, an online survey platform. The survey was open from April 23 to May 12.

A link to the anonymous survey was sent via email to 1,425 faculty in the FAS and the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. The list comprised all faculty named on the FAS masthead for the current academic year, which also includes FAS department and standing committee affiliates whose appointments are in other Harvard schools.

In total, 406 faculty replied, with 260 filling the survey completely and 146 partially completing the survey.

To check for response bias, The Crimson compared respondents’ self-reported demographic data with publicly available data on FAS faculty demographics for the 2024-2025 academic year. (Unlike The Crimson’s survey, this data only includes faculty with FAS appointments.) The demographic data of survey respondents generally match these publicly available data.

Sixty percent of respondents said they hold a tenure or tenure-track position, according to the survey. According to the FAS Dean’s 2024 Annual Report, 56.81 percent of FAS faculty are tenured or on the tenure track.

Forty percent of respondents who identified their gender on the survey said they are female. Thirty percent of respondents who reported their race did not identify themselves as white. (Another 13 percent of respondents did not identify their gender, and 23 percent declined to identify their race.)

These figures compare to 39 percent of FAS faculty who identify as women and 28.8 percent who are not white, according to the FAS Dean’s Report.

Among respondents who said they hold a tenure or tenure-track position, 34.5 percent belong to the Arts and Humanities division, 26.7 percent to the Sciences division, 32.8 percent to the Social Sciences division, and 6 percent to the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

That means Arts and Humanities faculty were overrepresented and SEAS faculty were underrepresented among survey respondents. According to publicly available data for the 2023-24 academic year from Harvard’s Faculty Development and Diversity Office, the most recent year for which data is available, 26.4 percent belong to the Arts and Humanities division, 27.9 percent to the Sciences division, 32.5 percent to the Social Sciences division, and 13.2 to SEAS.

The Crimson could not find public FAS data on the distribution of non-ladder faculty across the divisions.

Survey responses were not adjusted for selection bias.

—Staff writer William C. Mao can be reached at william.mao@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @williamcmao.

—Staff writer Veronica H. Paulus can be reached at veronica.paulus@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @VeronicaHPaulus.