Veritas: Now Subject to Committee Approval!

Dead men tell no lies: I’m more confident of this than I am that Harvard’s concentration policies benefit us. In fact, it’s because I trust the opinion of the not-so-recently deceased that I think that the rules regarding what students can study have to change. Take Aristotle, for example. In a head to head-to-head match, Aristotle’s educational approach proves more conducive to students’ pursuit of their educational goals than that of the Harvard Registrar’s Office.

In one corner, we have the Harvard Registrar informing us that:“All degree candidates must fulfill the requirements of one of the recognized fields of concentration, an approved joint concentration, or an approved special concentration.” Want to major in art history and English? First, have a thesis in mind. Petition both departments, and you might get approved. You’d like to concentrate in economics and mathematics, you say? Transfer to Columbia.

While the administration has good reason to be wary of students taking on excessive course loads, students who desire to study two subjects and who are prepared to handle the work should be allowed to do so. Objectors might reasonably point to the existence of secondary fields, but this response is less than satisfying. Secondary fields are meant to provide the opportunity for guided work in a field outside of the concentration, not to unite two fields in the same way a joint concentration would.

Yet declaring a joint concentration requires an approval process that is unnecessarily difficult—art history and English as a pairing should be considered as intellectually worthwhile as English alone. The College’s approval process sends the message that studying two fields is inherently more suspect than studying one. Even worse, some fields, such as economics, apparently have no way to integrate with other subject areas—or so the College would have us think.

A student should be allowed to pursue two fields even if they do not form a unified thesis. The point of education is to learn, not just to write a thesis. The Freshman Dean’s Office tells first-year students that “your choice of concentration should be based on your intellectual interests.” What, then, are students to do when their intellectual interests combine two disparate fields, such as art history and engineering sciences? Yes, these students can pursue a secondary field. But their desire to pursue more than six courses should be recognized by the College as if their interests, in the Registrar’s words, constituted “an undergraduate concentration offered in its own right”.

Such rhetoric does students a disservice by indicating that their interests require a bureaucratic seal of approval because of their unusual nature. Instead, the process for declaring a concentration should include a provision in which all concentrations offer pre-approved ways to combine their field with any other field. That way, these students can have a sanctioned progression of courses that can simply be filled in their plan of study.

When students learn for learning’s sake through a dual major, they find support from Aristotle. The famed Greek philosopher notes that as long as education is meant to further our ability to “act with understanding,” students should pursue it. That means majors, double majors, and nearly every other type of academic classification should be treated as equally worthwhile.

What should Harvard administrators learn from this long-dead thinker? College policies should allow students to be students: to study without rigid barriers to concentration choice. Even for those who happen to like art history and engineering sciences, the College’s attitude should not begin with the assumption that the unusual is aberrant.

Restrictions on combining certain fields with others should also be removed. For example, the art of household management, Aristotle’s version of economics, is studied as an integral part of quite a few disciplines; in fact, “all other pursuits that involve the acquisition of what is necessary for life.” A broader interdisciplinary approach towards economics couldn’t be found even in Social Analysis 10.

Most importantly, Aristotle’s notion of school as leisure should remind us that a thesis need not be required in order for us to study what we want. If students’ education, as the FDO rightly notes, ought to answer the question, “What do you want to learn?” then the College should establish concentration policies that give primacy to our answers to this question—not to a thesis or the interrelatedness of the multiple answers we might well give.

Aristotle: 1. Registrar’s Office: 0.

Gregory A. DiBella ’12, a Crimson editorial writer, is a government concentrator in Mather House.