Harvard Needs a Performance Review

It’s time for Harvard to copy Yale.

Earlier this month, Yale University released a detailed report outlining a pantheon of issues contributing to an erosion in the American public’s trust in higher education. Among others, they identified the most critical factors as the rising cost of accessing higher education, the opacity of the admissions process, and the state of discourse and pedagogy on college campuses.

Harvard, too, is due for a reckoning — its walk should match its talk.

The purpose of the University ought to be academic excellence, explored through critical and open inquiry by an intellectually diverse body of students and faculty in the pursuit of veritas. Yet, in recent years, we’ve strayed from that mission.

Thankfully, there have been some promising signs of course correction from Harvard leadership. Efforts by University Hall to promote institutional neutrality, intellectual vitality, and recentering academics are a good start at aligning our practices with our purpose. But there’s more to go.

The problem is that, so far, Harvard has continued like most others — cobbling a piecemeal approach to reforms, reactive to the news cycle or the whims of Washington. Harvard instead should take a page out of Yale’s book: we need a comprehensive reflection on our institutional purpose, the extent to which we’ve deviated from it, and how to return.

Here’s where to start.

As we’ve expressed before, Harvard has a responsibility to foster robust free speech norms on campus. The classroom should be a place of intellectual humility, where diverse perspectives can interact without fear of social condemnation. Yale’s report points out the important connection between free speech and our educational mission — “echo chambers do not produce the best teaching, research, or scholarship.”

We agree — academic excellence depends on Harvard’s ability to end self-censorship.

Nevertheless, Harvard’s drift from its academic mission is not due to free speech concerns alone. This semester’s grading proposal muck has demonstrated how badly academic life at the College is in need of reform. Grade inflation runs rampant, and professors are frustrated with students disengaged with their coursework. In light of generative AI, the academic environment needs to ensure students truly read and write, often, and on their own.

Beyond the proposed A-grade cap set to begin in 2027, we hope to see pedagogy recenter meaningful learning experiences in the pursuit of mastery. That means finding ways to enhance course rigor first, before — or instead of — setting specific grading distributions.

Recentering academics, however, must start from the very beginning. The College is long overdue to apply uniform academic criteria to admissions. A rigorous classroom environment necessitates high standards applied consistently for all applicants. The Board has previously affirmed the unjustness of legacy advantage — it’s time to apply one standard to all applicants, including recruited athletes.

As Harvard’s place in our nation — and certainly our world — evolves, so must its functioning. Taken separately, any of the consequential problems now addressed by University committees lack the fuller context required to make the necessary changes. Hence, a broader investigation, similar to Yale’s, would be well-timed for the University.

None of Harvard’s issues exist in a vacuum — it’s time to stop conducting reforms as if they do.

This staff editorial solely represents the majority view of The Crimson Editorial Board. It is the product of discussions at regular Editorial Board meetings. In order to ensure the impartiality of our journalism, Crimson editors who choose to opine and vote at these meetings are not involved in the reporting of articles on similar topics.

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