The Future of the Liberal Arts Looks a Lot Like the Past

You don’t need to reinvent the wheel every time the world changes — or, in Harvard’s case, its pedagogical philosophy.

The past few years have seen Harvard sailing through a storm. It has defended its funding, its students, its admissions practices, and, on particularly grim days, its right to exist without a federal babysitter.

But, as the University’s most immediate crises begin to stabilize, Harvard should resist the temptation to stay satisfied with merely remaining afloat. With room to breathe, it must confront a broader question: What should the future of the liberal arts look like?

Students must leave college possessing more than mere credentials. The next era of the academy should recover an older educational seriousness — one that emphasizes broad learning, close teaching, honest criticism, and intellectual risk.

The future of the liberal arts, in short, looks somewhat like the past.

There’s one important exception: If Harvard is going to recommit itself to the liberal arts, it needs to start by asking who enters its classrooms. A liberal arts college ought to admit students capable of doing serious intellectual work.

That can sound trite, but the current system too often confuses that trait with its most polished simulacra. A teenager with an expensive essay coach and a registered nonprofit may look more compelling than one whose talents were never packaged for Ivy League consumption. This should trouble a university whose whole business is supposed to be identifying academic promise.

Financial aid helps, but comes up short. Though Harvard can expand its aid packages, generosity doesn’t benefit the student who never applies in the first place. That’s why recruitment matters. Harvard can’t claim to admit the best students if it only seriously searches among those who already know how to find it.

The University should therefore publish clearer socioeconomic data and recruit more aggressively from under-resourced schools and communities. Furthermore, it ought to reduce inherited advantages by ending any admissions practice that launders privilege as merit.

A New Face for Academics

Getting the right students into Harvard is only useful if the University actually teaches them.

Yet too much of undergraduate education has become optional. There’s little incentive to attend a recorded lecture available for later high-speed viewing, nor to complete a reading that can be ignored without consequence.

Although AI added fuel to the fire, it’s not the core issue. Technology is merely one contributor to the declining depth of engagement in university classrooms. The primary issue is that too much academic work is busywork, the skimmable kind easily forgotten by an incessantly optimizing student.

In any case, the goal should be to add good work and remove bad work. To stop harmful AI use, Harvard needs more in-person exams and oral defenses — assignments that require students to know what they think, because at some point, they will have to say it out loud.

During trying times, the solution will involve a rethinking of course staff. Teaching fellows and course assistants are often excellent, but under the fiscal duress we face today, the University must consider putting to use those who have spent their lives thinking seriously about a subject. Too often, professors appear at the front of the lecture hall while the real teaching is outsourced down the chain.

If pedagogy is about how Harvard teaches, curriculum is about whether what is taught adds up to anything. Right now, the answer is: sort of.

Take Harvard’s current version of General Education. A student can spend a semester on the science of cooking, another on East Asian cinema, and a third on African spirituality, coming away with an intellectually colorful transcript, but at the expense of structure. A pile of niche courses, on their own, does not constitute a liberal arts education. While GenEds gesture at breadth, the result is little more than taste-testing.

What students need are foundations. Begone, the ostensible distinction between “learning facts” and “learning how to think.” After all, thinking requires something to think with.

Harvard should therefore place greater emphasis on rigorous introductory courses with substantial methodological exposure, such as Computer Science 50: “Introduction to Computer Science,” History 10: “A History of the Present,” and Humanities 10: “A Humanities Colloquium.”

More departments should have classes that a department can be proud to put in front of the whole College, both broad enough for the student who will never take another course in the field and serious enough for the future concentrator.

Grading, Reloaded

A curriculum with real shape will also require real standards.

Harvard should not pretend grade inflation is fake, or that concerns about academic rigor are just moral panic dressed up in tweed. When a huge share of grades land in the A range, grades lose their meaning. A measure of mastery becomes a receipt for course completion.

That’s bad for professors, who lose one of their clearest tools for distinguishing excellence from competence. It’s also bad for students, who lose the feedback that would help them to learn.

So while the cap on A grades will reduce the number of A’s, Harvard must acknowledge that the policy cannot tell us what an A should mean.

Grades should serve as evidence of the learning that students have accomplished. Feedback should be specific and equip its recipient to improve. Standards should be so clear that students can’t help but know what they must achieve. And assignments should always be substantive enough that evaluating them is worth everyone’s time.

That means the work of grading reform has to happen inside courses, not just in faculty legislation and numeric quotas. Harvard should reward professors who build classes around criticism and revision. Pedagogy should not entail disposable assignments that exist to pad the denominator. Instead, classes must make room for fewer, better pieces of work.

The Role of Disagreement

All of these components — admissions, pedagogy, curriculum, grading — serve the same end: Harvard has to become a place where students are skilled at, and engaged in, making arguments.

The health of Harvard’s intellectual environment depends not only on the lack of sanctions for expressing an unpopular view, but also on a culture of disagreement that promotes discussion, no matter how high the political pressure. Creating such a culture requires teaching students how to maintain one.

Courses should surface real intellectual conflict, and students should encounter arguments they dislike without being invited to dismiss them as contaminants. They have to learn to separate a weak argument from an immoral one, and an immoral argument from one they have not yet understood. They ought to be asked, sometimes, to defend positions they do not hold — not because all views are equally good, but because knowing why something is wrong takes more than knowing that one’s friends also dislike it.

But intellectual vitality also demands trust. Students will not take intellectual risks if they think disagreement will be punished socially or graded ideologically. Professors and teaching fellows need to make clear that the classroom is a place for serious testing of arguments, not mimicry of the instructor’s priors. Sending that message can happen by training TFs for the task and setting clear grading standards. It can be also accomplished by having faculty model disagreement themselves.

Perhaps it once made sense for the liberal arts to be a loose bundle of interesting courses with inflated grades — but no longer.

Truthfully, the liberal arts ideal has always been compromised. Old Harvard excluded too many people, rewarded too much inherited privilege, and mistook polish for virtue. There is no golden age to resurrect.

Still, there is an older ambition worth recovering. Harvard has a duty to admit talent more broadly, teach students more directly, evaluate them more honestly, and ask them to argue more seriously.

If Harvard is to demonstrate that its education is more than a token convertible into consulting offers, it must embrace the liberal arts in its older form, one that enables students to think seriously about the world and their obligations within it.

That is the point of a school — Harvard would do well to act like one.

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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