A Vision, Softly Creeping

This week, Harvard President Lawrence H. Summers announced the proposed transformation of the University’s Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences (DEAS) into the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, creating a more impressive name and promising a more beefy complement of faculty and resources. The move does the improbable; it is at once trivial and menacing for the overwhelming majority of Harvard undergraduates.

If approved by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) this fall, the change will create a “school within a school,” which would remain part of FAS. Undergraduates would retain their affiliation with Harvard College. Indeed, the change’s ramifications appear to be minor, yet positive—except for the promised faculty-hiring spree (which is arguably long overdue anyway), the biggest change seems to be cosmetic. A school is a whole lot easier to sell than a division. Harvard seems to be taking the bait.

Nonetheless, new money and fresh blood will doubtless improve Harvard’s engineering and applied science programs, and at the graduate level, this ought to be applauded. There’s no question that the University’s ability to attract the very best engineers to do their work in an innovative, collaborative academic environment (read: Allston) is vital. But so far as undergraduates are concerned, the move may threaten the very foundation of Harvard’s educational philosophy: the liberal arts.

At first glance, the creation of the new school seems a positive development for Harvard’s long-suffering undergraduate engineers. If students want to come to Harvard to study engineering, they should have a world-class program at their disposal, shouldn’t he? The fact that Harvard annually loses scores of admitted would-be engineering undergrads to schools with better-developed and better-hyped engineering programs—like Stanford, Princeton, and MIT—is a bad thing, right? Not necessarily.

American college students take part in a unique educational tradition. Unlike their peers in Canada or Britain (or South Africa, or Indonesia, or just about anywhere else), undergraduates in this country profit from a liberal arts philosophy that seeks to produce well-educated citizens, not well-trained professionals. As the current Harvard College Curricular Review continues to seek new ways to liberalize undergraduate academics, most recently by delaying concentration choice to the middle of sophomore year, the importance of protecting this liberal arts tradition cannot be overstated.

Undergraduate engineering programs impose a daunting set of requirements on their students to maintain universal accreditation standards. These rigorous prerequisites functionally contravene the American liberal arts philosophy; being forced to commit to fulfilling a mile-long list of engineering requirements as a freshman necessarily eliminates the chance to dabble and explore, which is supposed to be the purpose of the first year. Some may of course object that non-engineers often restrict themselves to taking courses in fields similar to their own, and so engineering requirements are simply an articulation of what undergraduates wind up doing themselves anyway.

However, there is an important difference: While a social studies concentrator who chooses to take nothing but electives in political theory does so by choice, an engineering student simply does not have those electives in the first place. There are plenty of social studies concentrators who dabble in fields other than their own; engineers who try to do the same risk failing to complete their concentration requirements in four years. It is hardly a surprise then that many engineering concentrators take a ninth semester to finish their degrees.

This extra semester is independently problematic. Aside from emphasizing the importance of a broad academic program and the ability to choose a diverse set of electives, most American colleges are also philosophically committed to the four-year undergraduate program. Canadian university students frequently take five or more years to complete a bachelor’s degree, while American students are often discouraged from doing so by college rules. The reason is simple; in this country, college, like high school, is understood to be a phase in one’s education of a prescribed length, undertaken with peers who are similar in age and inexperience. Engineering programs, which can force an added semester—or more—on their students, take a bite out of this part of the college philosophy.

By creating a quasi-independent School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard institutionalizes the distinctions between undergraduate engineers and their College peers, posing an added threat to Harvard’s effort to fulfill its liberal arts mission for all of its students. One of Harvard’s virtues is its unitary undergraduate population, and even though the proposed school would only educate undergraduates through Harvard College, its designation as a “school” opens the door to further devolution in the future. When the University justifies the creation of the proposed new school in terms of its larger scientific mission and its ability to compete with peer institutions, it is reasonable to worry that similar rhetoric could be used to justify compromising the application of the liberal arts philosophy to engineering undergraduates in the future.

As FAS considers the creation of a new School of Engineering and Applied Sciences in the coming months, its challenge should be to reconcile three competing desires: the urge to compete with schools like Stanford and Princeton that frequently gobble up would-be Harvardians eager to study engineering; the need to complement new multidisciplinary initiatives in the sciences with a world-class engineering program; and, most importantly, the aspiration to work toward the first two aims without sacrificing Harvard College’s liberal arts mission. To be perfectly honest, I’m not sure how this can best be accomplished.

Harvard could eliminate engineering as an undergraduate concentration, and focus the new school’s efforts on world-class graduate programs, but doing so would deprive the College of vital exposure to an important field of inquiry. At the opposite extreme, Harvard could re-create an independent school, separate from FAS and the College (an autonomous undergraduate Harvard Engineering School existed here from 1919 until the late 1940s and the creation of DEAS), but doing so would split. Harvard’s undergraduate population in a way that would run contrary to the colorful character of a liberal arts institution. Engineering could become a five-year program, with more time for exploration to complement the field’s hefty requirements. But Harvard would then lose the collegiality that America’s four-year college tradition exists to ensure.

Unsatisfying a compromise it may be, the solution seems to be preserving the undergraduate engineering program as distinct from the new school, injecting a paltry dose of the liberal arts through the Core (or whatever new system of distribution requirements replaces it), and developing the new school as a focus for graduate, post-graduate, and faculty research and collaboration. Through the liberal use of joint-appointments between the new school and FAS, undergraduate engineers could take advantage of the new school’s resources and faculty without actually ever being a part of it. Their continued, unmodified membership in the College and in FAS should ensure that Harvard doesn’t tumble down the slippery slope toward the kind of anti-liberal arts, segregated status quo at schools like Columbia, whose undergraduate engineers have institutional affiliations different from their peers’.

The legacy of President Summers will add to Harvard’s ability to contribute to scientific inquiry through institutionalized collaboration and innovation. One can only hope that Harvard College’s liberal arts focus won’t be torpedoed in the process.



Adam Goldenberg ’08 is a social studies concentrator in Winthrop House. His column appears regularly.