— Daniel 12:4
This year’s rise and subsequent suspension of the idea of course preregistration teaches many lessons. One is surely that students aren’t fooled by Orwellian Newspeak. They detected inside the candy-coated “Early Course Selection” the outlines of early course exclusion, which became more visible in the final proposal’s requirement of the instructor’s permission to add a course even during the first week of classes.
A deeper lesson of the preregistration controversy is to distinguish educational ends from means. The principal objective of preregistration was the prediction of course enrollments, and with that understood, better alternatives could be considered.
The first public mention of preregistration was last August, in a pamphlet published by GSAS. Thus the driving force behind preregistration was the important issue of employment security for graduate students. Improved undergraduate advising was an afterthought, convenient for awhile but awkwardly abandoned when it was agreed that other methods might be used for predicting enrollments.
By the time the debate ended, a great many sensible things had been said about the educational disadvantages of preregistration. But preregistration was a bad idea also because it wouldn’t work as a predictor of course enrollments. Our registrar so advised the deans last summer, based on her prior experience as registrar at two schools with preregistration, Boston University and the University of Arizona. Preregistration is a useful method for allocating scarce enrollment slots where many courses have caps. But it does not produce good results if enrollments are open, unless students are not allowed to change courses. In any case, without a clearer picture of the magnitude of the problem—how bad are current enrollment estimates?—it would have been hard to know if preregistration had improved matters.
Another lesson of the preregistration debacle is to remember Harvard history, because so little now happens at Harvard for the first time. Ever since University President Charles W. Eliot, Class of 1853, first instituted that “Free Elective” system in the 1860s that allowed students choice in their class selection, professors have been complaining about students “shopping” their lectures. After several failed proposals to curb the phenomenon, a preregistration system was put in place for a few decades in the early 20th century but was finally abandoned in 1954, when the Faculty acknowledged that it didn’t work. In the words of a report from 1949, “preliminary registration is of little use as an indication of enrollment in the Fall since students make extensive changes in their final registration, and does not succeed in making students think seriously about their future programs, being aware of the opportunity to change their minds later.” Here, in one sentence from more than 50 years ago, based on extensive experiential evidence, we have both a definitive dismissal of the justifications for the recent preregistration proposal, and proof that those who ignore our history are doomed to repeat it.
The end of course shopping was clearly visible in the background of the preregistration drama this year. Official pronouncements stated that the end of shopping was not the objective, but most of the faculty conversations to which I was party focused less on predicting enrollments than on ending shopping. It was this ambivalence about goals that led to student mistrust of the proposal. Ultimately strong objections from several professors in the March Faculty meeting caused the proposal to be shelved, even though most faculty would probably have preferred that shopping be eliminated.
Today, as 100 years ago, many faculty express indignation about shoppers, as though they think, “I am a Harvard professor. I am not a peach or a loaf of bread, to be picked up, squeezed, sniffed, and put back.” But until this year’s controversies reminded us of its importance, shopping was largely taken for gran