The Faculty of Arts and Sciences’ committee examining the culture of Harvard’s classrooms has reported unsettling findings about students’ commitment to their courses, devotion to extracurriculars at the expense of academics, and distractions and inhibitions related to social media. Those and other broad findings—emerging from surveys of and conversations with undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty members—put in a new and broadly challenging context the immediate concerns about campus discourse stemming from the protests that followed the Hamas attack on Israel in October 2023. Those events led Dean Hopi Hoekstra to form the Classroom Social Compact Committee (CSCC) a year ago.
See the bottom of this post for an update reflecting the discussion at the FAS faculty meeting during the afternoon of February 4.
During what must have been an excruciating first semester for Hoekstra in her role leading the FAS, in the fall term of 2023, her response to the tumult encompassed, among other steps, an initiative on civil discourse and training for faculty members in case protests disrupted classes. Early in the spring semester, as President Alan M. Garber and provost John F. Manning organized University task forces on institutional neutrality and open inquiry, Hoekstra turned the faculty’s attention to the core of its work with students, appointing the classroom compact group, led by Coolidge professor of history Maya Jasanoff and Goldman professor of economics David Laibson (also faculty dean of Lowell House).
The resulting report, to be discussed this afternoon at the first FAS meeting of the spring semester, frankly acknowledges some pressures on teaching and learning in the current political context, and proposes a statement and measures to ameliorate them. Hoekstra, writing in a letter to Jasanoff and Laibson January 31 to endorse the committee’s recommendations, acknowledged the report as “a nuanced and comprehensive portrait of where we are today”—but went on to say that it also includes “some hard truths about our learning culture”: issues demanding further attention and broader solutions.
During an interview about the report on February 3, Jasanoff acknowledged that although “this committee was charged at a moment of particular focus on campus climate, our finding suggested that many of the issues” concerning free speech, discourse, and intellectual vitality “really nest within a much larger set of issues faculty and students have been discussing for many years.” Those issues, she amplified, encompass the effect on teaching and learning when a cell phone or laptop provides access to much of the world’s intellectual capital, and students’ approach to learning when they feel pressured by the need “to succeed in the postgraduate world.” The CSCC’s work, in effect, became “a pulse-taking at this particular moment in the life of an ongoing institution” committed to core academic pursuits.
The Committee’s Brief and Response
The “compact” in the title is significant. Hoekstra charged the committee with developing guidance for students and instructors on “their role in contributing to a vibrant learning environment.” She aimed to encourage use of “the skills and framework of civil discourse in the classroom” to “increase the likelihood that a broad range of perspectives will be heard and that participants will open themselves to new ideas.” Another desideratum, she continued, is ensuring that “everyone in the classroom—students and instructors alike—has a shared understanding of how they together contribute to an environment that promotes discovery, learning, and meaningful dialogue.” The “ultimate goal” was articulating in “simple, clear terms our community’s shared goals for the FAS classroom and the roles of students, both undergraduate and graduate, and their instructors in fostering them. In addition to developing these statements, the CSCC will provide recommendations for strengthening and nurturing a vibrant classroom.”
The result of the committee’s outreach and analysis of survey data is a pair of statements meant to inform the classroom obligations of both parties to the compact. The FAS is being asked to approve adding this guidance for undergraduates to the Harvard College Handbook for Students (emphases added):
A Harvard College education is defined by the pursuit of knowledge. The classroom forms the center of a Harvard College education, and students are expected to prioritize their coursework.
Academic excellence requires students to participate in a thoughtful, candid, and free exchange of ideas. A successful classroom depends on student attendance, attentiveness, and active intellectual engagement. Students should approach learning with curiosity, intellectual openness, respect for new ideas and for other people’s perspectives. Students should expect regularly to encounter evidence, analysis, interpretations, and opinions that challenge their point of view. Student speech, assignments, and exams can be evaluated by instructors as factually incorrect or poorly argued, for example—but a student’s status in a course, including their grades, will not be affected by their political or ethical point of view.
As a default, no member of a course—instructors or students—should post on social media (or share information that enables others to post) identifiable student classroom statements without written consent. Likewise, class participants should assume that, while they may discuss classroom conversations outside of class, they may not attribute ideas to a specific student without that student’s written consent. Violations of social media and course confidentiality policies will be reviewed by the Harvard College Honor Council, which will also determine sanctions. Confidentiality policies do not override Harvard’s Non-Discrimination, Anti-Bullying, & Other Professional Conduct Policies.
The Faculty Handbook will be modified by adding comparable language (no vote is required), which underscores that teaching is “a core part of a faculty member’s work at Harvard.” It goes on to assure that faculty members “will not be denied the ability to propose and teach courses on the basis of the content of the opinions and viewpoints they express outside the classroom” and that “Course heads are free to present a curriculum and points of view, including their own views, that reflect the intellectual objectives of their subject and discipline”—fundamental elements of academic freedom. It further underscores faculty members’ freedom of speech: “Course heads have the right to share their personal views inside and outside of Harvard (e.g. on social media, in an interview, in a publication), consistent with the FAS’s guarantees of freedom of speech and academic freedom and subject to Harvard’s Non-Discrimination and Anti-Bullying Policy.”
From there, it reminds the faculty members of their responsibility to “create a classroom environment in which students may participate in a thoughtful, candid, and free exchange of ideas”—and absolutely prohibits enrollment decisions specifically “to exclude actual or perceived viewpoints.” Similarly, grading and course status are to be determined by such factors as factual correctness or the quality of a student’s arguments, but “will not be affected by their political or ethical point of view.” Finally, faculty members would be placed under limits like those imposed on students to maintain the confidentiality of student statements in classes.
At first glance, both texts would produce commonsense practices: for example, a Chatham House Rule prohibiting identification of student statements outside the classroom without written consent—addressing both social media, specifically, and attribution by name in conversation more generally. There is also the explicit recognition of faculty members’ academic freedom and free-speech rights, and the associated guarantee of students’ “political or ethical” points of view in matters academic.
The Underlying Evidence
After so much campus turmoil, it comes as relief to turn from the investigations of and litigation focused on alleged violations of Harvard’s nondiscrimination and harassment policies, and of federal civil rights law, to academics. Furthermore, the report provides some encouraging evidence that the academic enterprise in Crimson classrooms is doing at least okay. For example, measured by mean scores of responses to surveys, students in this decade are more likely to report “I feel comfortable asking clarifying questions during class when I am having difficulty following the material being taught” than any undergraduates since the 1950s—the decade before Vietnam, the civil rights movement, and other upheavals. Related questions result in all-time high scores for the belief that “I feel my contributions to class discussions are valued by the teaching staff” and “I feel my contributions to class discussions are valued by other students in the class.” All good.
On the other hand, by the same measures, Harvard classes are suffering some of the same ills that apparently afflict the larger society. Mean scores show a relentless decline in responses to statements such as “In the courses I have taken, most other students listen and participate with an open mind and a willingness to change their point of view as they learn more about the topic” and “In the courses I have taken, I feel comfortable expressing my views on controversial topics.” And the mean scores for the 2020-2023 cohort show a decline from the responses to the statement, “The courses I have taken incorporate diverse perspectives and allow for exploration of different viewpoints,” compared to the prior two decades.
The report presents further evidence of unwanted classroom conditions. In the most recent senior survey, among students who reported some reluctance about expressing their views on controversial issues, 72 percent cited the fear that “other students would make critical comments about me with other people afterward,” and 69 percent that “other students would criticize my views as offensive.” Among faculty members surveyed in the summer of 2024 who expressed reservations about teaching or researching controversial issues, the leading concern was “unwanted attention outside the University, such as on social media or in the press.” (It is unlikely that most faculty members feel less concerned about such matters today, given the new administration in Washington’s critique of universities’ diversity programs, and disruption of research grants.)
Laibson, discussing the report, was at pains to urge caution in interpreting some of the survey data, reflecting very low response rates and the resulting small sample sizes. At the same time, he noted that some of the results reveal interesting discrepancies. The annual senior surveys, much quoted, tend to show relatively higher negative scores about the caliber of classroom discussion, whereas evaluations of individual classes show more favorable scores. It is possible that the former results reflect students’ appraisal of their entire College academic experience, which may be colored by an occasional bad course experience. On the other hand, he noted, it is possible that the more favorable evaluations of each course perversely represent an unwanted trend: students self-selecting courses that fit with their preexisting beliefs. (Neither set of surveys reveals how many students are taking courses that could be considered purely intellectual—apart from political or ideological issues, as most likely are—such as a standard literature or computer science class, versus those that might engage sharply divided social or partisan questions.)
Overall, the portrait that emerges of students and faculty members today (responding at a fraught time after a truly troubling academic year) reflects different pressures and constraints, consistent with the respondents’ different stages of life and role within the academy. But neither cohort seems especially relaxed and comfortable about the conditions they perceive shaping their academic interactions.
Finally, and unsurprisingly, self-reported conservatives—a minority of the community population on this and similar campuses at selective colleges and universities—report feeling more inhibited in their community discourse.
Assessing the evidence, from survey data to the qualitative impressions garnered in the committee’s many meetings with community members, Laibson said of its major findings, “These are not issues that are essentially of the moment. These are issues that have characterized…our educational environment for a long time.” But awareness of those concerns has been “crystallized” by the upheaval since October 2023, he continued, creating “an important moment to think together about what we want our intellectual environment to be, and to move forward intentionally.” Citing challenges ranging from the apparently diminished centrality of the classroom to students’ experience, changed grading norms, and altered workloads stemming from the pandemic to a widespread sense that people are “less and less comfortable” engaging with each other in classrooms and dining halls, Laibson said, “The sooner we take these on, the better.”
Failing the Three A’s of a Harvard Education?
Whatever these data may convey about how an increasingly polarized society influences discourse within the academy—and particularly during traumas such as the Middle East war or a heated U.S. presidential election—the more important news in the report thus concerns the quotidian characteristics of a Harvard education. Consider again the language proposed for the handbook: “students are expected to prioritize their coursework,” and what one might deem the Three As: “A successful classroom depends on student attendance, attentiveness, and active intellectual curiosity” (emphasis added).
Those passages derive from the committee’s findings that “concerns about open inquiry nest within a larger set of challenges that faculty and students encounter in Harvard’s classrooms”—Jasanoff’s point. Among them, the committee catalogues these sentiments reported by undergraduates:
•They may pick classes or sections that align with their pre-existing opinions.
•They may pick classes more on the basis of perceived easiness, both in terms of the hours of work and the likelihood of receiving a high grade, than on intellectual interest.
•Some view college as an opportunity to refine defenses of their existing political viewpoints, rather than as an opportunity to explore new perspectives, derived from interactions with peers and instructors.
•They may shy away from difficult conversations, both inside and outside classrooms, and do not see even a dining hall or a rooming group as necessarily a setting in which they can have conversations across political differences.
•They may tend to segregate into social groups with like-minded opinions.
And by graduate students:
•In their role as teaching fellows (TFs), they worry that their undergraduate students misattribute lower grades to TF bias rather than the quality of the work being done.
•They are very concerned, as TFs, about their teaching evaluations. They sometimes feel that they can’t give candid feedback to their students without jeopardizing their scores.
•They may worry, as TFs, that covering controversial topics in class will lead to negative
student feedback and allegations of bias.
And by course instructors:
•Undergraduates often don’t attend class.
•Students often don’t do many of the assigned readings.
•Students seek out classes that are reputed to be particularly easy (“gems”).
•Students are often overwhelmed by the commitments they make to non-academic activities, including athletics, pre-professional organizations, social clubs, and myriad other extra-curricular activities.
•Students are hungry for pre-professional guidance and seek it outside the classroom and curriculum (e.g. from peers, extra-curricular organizations, and from employers).
•Many students have come to expect more flexibility about attendance requirements and coursework than was typical pre-COVID.
•Students have rising expectations for high grades, but falling expectations for effort.
•Some students are uncomfortable with curricular content that is not aligned with the student’s moral framework.
There are plenty of other specific worries: undergraduates’ fear of peers’ approval and social shunning, and their embarrassment if they give a “wrong” answer to a question or seek clarification about something; graduate students’ feeling pressure to appear knowledgeable and sophisticated; instructors’ concern that some TFs allow political ideology to influence their evaluation of students or presentation of course content.
But the overall impression is that the fundamental enterprise of teaching and learning—call it the Crimson classroom contract—is broken, or at least badly asymmetrical, because not all parties are pulling their weight. In the view of instructors, coursework is a low priority for too many College students particularly—and when they do attend, they are too socially frightened to fully engage intellectually and too determined to prioritize good grades over actual learning. It is worth noting that at its meeting last November, the faculty discussed a recommendation to limit students’ absence from classes and the campus to pursue their extracurricular interests. Pushing back against students’ increasing inclination to be AWOL for extended periods because “They may be invited to shoot a television pilot or participate in a month-long chess tournament, to pitch their start-up to investors or represent their country in the Winter Olympics,” the faculty voted in December that absence for more than two weeks during any one term will result in the offending students being placed on involuntary leave.
What Is to Be Done?
In addition to the principles and procedures embedded in the proposed texts for the student and faculty handbooks, the committee recommended that:
•attending classes “should be the norm”;
•FAS and its divisions and departments should consider “regularizing approaches to grading scales and workload”;
•course evaluations should ask questions about each course’s “overall climate with respect to intellectual openness” and how each part of the instructional team “contributes to a clime of open inquiry”; and
•as a rule, students must never use cell phones or other internet-enabled devices in class except for authorized pedagogical purposes or to accommodate documented disabilities.
The committee also recommended formal programs to “onboard” new undergraduate and graduate students, training them “about the practices that can prepare them to thrive intellectually at Harvard”—in effect, training today’s social-media- and AI-saturated entering students how to be responsible students here, and inculcating the University’s academic norms. Similarly, new TFs and other instructors should be trained in how to create classroom environments conducive to open, productive questions and discourse. Course heads should make provisions for explaining their pedagogical expectations to TFs—and to students. And, more generally, FAS should
incentivize courses and course modules that promote reflective thinking and constructive dialogue across differences. Students should be encouraged to learn—and faculty to teach—how to think rigorously and critically about evidence; how to assess and distinguish between assertions, interpretations, and assumptions; and how to listen and respond to competing perspectives in good faith.
In one encouraging sense, this seems exactly right: focusing on the institution’s core academic mission, and using faults made clear in recent years to address performance that falls short of its aspirations.
In another, it can seem a return to battles waged, and apparently not won, in decades past: the protracted conversation about overhauling General Education courses under President Lawrence H. Summers—and subsequent attempts to effect further change; the effort a few years later, led by Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dean Theda Skocpol, to foster a “compact” (that concept again) to promote and pay for enhanced education throughout FAS; creation in 2011 of the Harvard Initiative for Learning and Teaching as a center for improving pedagogy; the subsequent excitement about and investment in online learning (edX); and the creation of an institutional office of the vice provost for advances in learning (where much technological innovation and outreach are now based). And yet, FAS now finds too many students cavalier about their courses, in faculty members’ view, and acculturated to behaviors that make them reluctant participants in what could and should be the best aspects of their own education.
“There Is a Great Deal of Alignment”
Laibson and Jasanoff emerge from their committee’s work surprisingly encouraged about the prospects for real change. Putting on her historian’s hat, Jasanoff noted that “an institution like Harvard that…extend[s] well beyond the lifespan of any individual” creates and sustains goals over the long term, while serving a multigenerational community. It must regularly assess how well its norms are being upheld by “the people who comprise the community in the present moment”: their skills, the way they learn to read and write before they reach Harvard, and so on. Whatever distress community members may feel about current students’ devotion to their cell phones during course sessions, for example, that behavior may change as today’s K-12 learners are increasingly taught in contexts that ban such devices from classrooms—and so bring different expectations with them when they matriculate.
For many of its specific recommendations, the committee invokes help from the Bok Center for Teaching and Learning, which is much involved in training instructors and faculty members how to do their work most effectively. Has it the capacity to take on the broader mission of helping onboard new instructors—and perhaps the wider student body? Laibson emphatically said, “Yes, the capacity exists, but it cannot be turned into behavior change overnight. A committed community,” he continued, can effect broad cultural change, slowly at first but then, perhaps, all at once. A realist, he said, “I’m not optimistic” about effecting wholesale change in the next six months—but “I’m quite optimistic over the next decade.” The community is “absolutely committed” to repairing FAS’s classroom culture.
“The knowledge base and the capacity” to improve are “absolutely here,” Jasanoff concurred. Hoekstra is committed to this work as dean, she said. The Bok Center has new leadership: Karen Thornber, Levin professor in literature and professor of East Asian languages and civilizations—not coincidentally, the leader of the successful effort to legislate the involuntary leaves of absence for students who skip more than two weeks of classes in a term. And the search for a successor dean of the College will no doubt consider these priorities as well. (During his service as College dean, now concluding, Rakesh Khurana made the “intellectual vitality” efforts to train undergraduates how to engage in effective discourse a major priority.) The challenge now, Jasanoff said, is to “assemble those pieces and get on task.” In Laibson’s view, “This is a set of issues on which there is a great deal of alignment,” among faculty members and students alike.
•••••••
The social compact committee’s report puts the focus back on the classroom, and on forces that frequently make that experience less that it should be. No one report is going to reverse the baleful effects of social media, or undo a student (and family) turn toward careerism at the expense of exploratory, liberal-arts learning. Nor can a worthy statement of principles repeal such cultural pressures. But in the spirit of not wasting a crisis—a time when so many external factors weigh on Harvard and higher education—any renewed attempt to devote attention to matters academic, and to concerted efforts to elevate performance, would be both welcome and strategic.
If the text of the report is posted by FAS, a link will be provided here.
Updated February 5, 2025, at 12:05 p.m.:
A presentation of the committee’s findings and recommendations by Jasanoff and Laibson at the February 4 FAS faculty meeting prompted one of the most vigorous and informed discussions in that forum in recent memory. Manyfaculty members endorsed the report and suggested ways to move toward implementing its suggestions.
The meeting itself began with Dean Hoekstra addressing deep anxieties about President Donald Trump’s recent executive orders temporarily halting the process of awarding research grants; attacking diversity initiatives; threatening foreign students who have supported Hamas in the wake of the October 7, 2023, attack on Israel; and directing the federal government to investigate large universities for alleged antisemitic behavior. (Indeed, amid such concerns and enhanced immigration enforcement, on the morning of February 5, members of the community received email guidance about how to react if “a person identifying as a law enforcement officer or agent” approaches them asking for access to nonpublic University information or spaces, presents a search warrant, and so on. In general, anyone so approached is directed to point such officers or agents to the Office of the General Counsel, and/or to contact the Harvard University Police.)
In that context, faculty members were at pains to underscore the importance of upholding academic standards—and assuring that the report’s language not be misinterpreted by external critics, as many statements and speeches now are.
Questioned by faculty members about whether the recommended Chatham House Rule protecting the privacy of students’ classroom statements could actually be enforced, Laibson offered three responses. First, the committee had considered the possible difficulties of enforcing the rule but thought that the effort to at least establish it as a norm or standard merited the attempt: a more meaningful step than simply offering an advisory recommendation. Second, he cited the successful use of such rules at the Law School, the Kennedy School, and the Business School, and said such experiences, and those at many other institutions, could be drawn upon to inform FAS’s effort to implement similar policies. Finally, he noted, the language the committee proposed, if adopted by FAS later this spring, was subject to review in five years.
Other faculty members sought to extend the confidentiality standard more widely—to teaching fellows and assistants, graduate students, and so on; and to venues beyond the classroom, such as seminars with invited guest speakers, conferences, and other campus gatherings for intellectual discourse.
Laibson and Jasanoff made it clear that faculty members’ classroom comments are not to be cloaked by the Chatham House Rule: in support of students’ discussion of classroom exchanges and learning, they said, the professors’ or instructors’ role in introducing material would of necessity have to be acknowledged.
Some faculty members were concerned that the language specifying that students’ work may not be evaluated on the basis of their political or ethical beliefs could be misread to imply that FAS or the committee believed such abuses have taken place. Absent any specific evidence of such bias, Laibson said outside perceptions of such bias do exist, and some students feel they have been wrongly graded on such a basis, but that the committee observed two important factors that point in other directions. First, among students surveyed who reported discomfort in expressing their authentic voices or beliefs, the proportion of those who cited their concerns about peers’ views was nearly twice as high as those who felt at risk of unfair grading (65 percent versus 35 percent). Second, he said it was important to remember that students view their instructors as authority figures; those perceptions shape their experience of their classes—so faculty members and instructors would do well, he suggested, to keep that authority in mind as they teach.
In general, the faculty members speaking from the floor embraced the committee’s recommended language, and particularly its strong endorsement of encouraging and protecting vigorous, open exchanges of views among instructors and students within and beyond the classroom setting. Dean Hoekstra warmly lauded the “incredibly thoughtful discussion,” which, she said, exemplified what a faculty meeting ought to be.
That spirit, if followed through with FAS’s adoption of the CSCC’s handbook language and broader implementation of its recommended policies and procedures, might begin to reward Laibson and Jasanoff’s optimism about their committee’s work.