It’s Academic (and Other Harvard Concerns)

A back-to-basics Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) meeting on March 4 focused on core academic concerns: students’ obligation to attend and pay attention to their classes, and slightly more rigorous grading options for their required course work. Those deliberations preceded matters that likely loomed larger for most attendees, to be discussed during an in camera briefing with President Alan M. Garber (as provided for by the faculty’s new rules for its formal meetings).

There is plenty to worry about, given the Trump Administration’s efforts to curtail federal reimbursements for the costs of research (and the associated, de facto suspension of new grantmaking); sweeping new federal guidance limiting diversity programs and policies; legislative proposals to significantly increase the tax on endowment income (by far Harvard’s largest source of operating revenue); and a U.S. Department of Justice investigation of this and nine other institutions for “incidents of antisemitism” (accompanied, the Crimson reports, by threats to sue the schools and choke off funding generally).

The anodyne announcement of FAS’s Faculty Council meeting for February 26 posted on the Harvard Gazette noted that the matters discussed included “presentations on the University’s finances and on its public affairs”—surely an heroic understatement. The faculty as a whole and the president no doubt had lots to talk about in their March 4 meeting.

Indeed, in her introductory remarks, FAS Dean Hopi Hoekstra told colleagues the current moment is “a time of uncomfortable uncertainty” amid executive orders affecting higher education, challenges to same in the courts, sweeping new guidance on diversity from the U.S. Department of Education, and more. “We need to prepare for significant financial challenges,” she continued, building “financial capacity” by finding ways to reduce expenses and enhance revenues. The faculty as a whole, she said, is already in a “structural deficit”—perhaps a reference to further declines in unrestricted reserves, continuing the trend reported last autumn in the fiscal year 2024 results. (Given that tuition and fees, once a principal source of unrestricted cash, are no longer growing after accounting for the costs of financial aid, and the Corporation’s decision to constrain the endowment distribution for this fiscal year, Hoekstra’s general remarks might be signaling something more significant. That is especially the case as FAS continues heavy capital spending on House renewal and other projects, and strives to keep up with peer institutions that are aggressively increasing financial aid.) Updated March 6, 2025, 11:20 a.m.: FAS confirms that “structural deficit” means that operations are in the red on an unrestricted cash basis.

The news on the evening of March 4 that the Trump administration is proposing to “stop work” on $51 million in existing contracts with Columbia, and to review all forms of federal support to that university, “in light of ongoing investigations for potential violations of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act” (i.e., even before findings that such violations of law in fact occurred), further darkened the fiscal and political context for Hoekstra’s remarks. There are indications that the “additional measures” being directed at Columbia are part of a wider set of actions that may well include Harvard, as the Trump administration pursues institutions that it feels have not stopped antisemitic acts on their campuses.

Coming to Classes

The recommendations of the Classroom Social Compact Committee (CSCC) to change some of the language in the Harvard College Handbook for Students, first presented at the previous FAS meeting (held February 4), met with support. The language is intended to underscore the importance of taking course work seriously; doing so in a spirit conducive to vigorous exchanges of views; and protecting the confidentiality of students’ participation in such exchanges. (See “‘Hard Truths’ about Harvard’s Classroom ‘Compact’” for a full report.)

Because that matter was deemed substantive under FAS rules, a vote on the proposed legislation could not occur until the March 4 meeting. Introducing the subject for its second debate and voting, CSCC co-chair Maya Jasanoff, Coolidge professor of history, noted the external context and characterized the CSCC recommendation as an “ethical stand”: an important way of highlighting “the value of intellectual engagement and the pursuit of knowledge” at a time when that work is under considerable challenge. The CSCC final language for the faculty’s consideration reads as follows:

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. Confidentiality policies do not override Harvard’s Non-Discrimination, Anti-Bullying, & Other Professional Conduct Policies.

The proposal was adopted by voice vote.

Grading for Gen Ed, and Beyond

New proposals introduced for discussion today (and possible enactment at a subsequent FAS meeting) would send a further signal to undergraduates about taking their academic requirements seriously, in two ways:

•The option to take one of the required four General Education courses pass/fail would be eliminated; beginning with the class of 2029, all four courses would be required to be letter-graded.

•The option to take the required Quantitative Reasoning with Data (QRD) course pass/fail would be eliminated; it too would be mandatorily letter-graded beginning with the class matriculating this August.

Data presented by the Standing Committee on General Education show that during the past five academic years, “the increase in undergraduate students taking General Education courses Pass/Fail has outpaced both the academic divisions and the College as a whole.” Although the number of College students taking courses pass/fail has increased only slightly from 3 percent to 4 percent, the proportion of those opting to take Gen Ed courses ungraded has nearly doubled, from 6 percent to 11 percent.

The rationale for permitting a pass/fail election was to encourage students to explore intellectually. But the committee now concludes that “has not actually resulted in students exploring new academic areas in which they might feel less confident, and has ended up instead adversely impacting the overall learning experience for students in lectures, sections and labs.” Student members of the committee echoed these concerns. Faculty members who teach the courses (meant to be flagships of the College curriculum, important to students’ broadened undergraduate experience) “have voiced concerns about both absenteeism and disengagement in post-semester reflections, and some students have complained about these” effects in their course evaluations. The fact that a significant number of Gen Ed courses now have 20 percent or more of those enrolled opting for pass/fail status (and a few as many as 40 percent) was apparently significant enough to raise alarms.

Presenting the proposal to the faculty, Gen Ed committee co-chair Fiery Cushman, professor of psychology, said students’ increasingly casual attitude toward some of their courses meant that rather than being the “crown jewel” of their education (as many professors teaching the classes perceive it), many undergraduates have come to see them as a set of requirements to be gotten out of the way as painlessly as possible. Even though faculty members sought to secure letter grading, he perceived an “externality” problem: the spread of pass/fail enrollment elsewhere put pressure on still more courses and instructors to be permissive.

Accordingly, “To increase the rigor of General Education courses and the engagement of all enrolled students,” the committee unanimously decided in May 2024 to propose mandatory letter-grading for such classes. That proposal, endorsed by all but one of the 160 faculty members offering Gen Ed instruction, is the one brought forth on March 4. (For transitional purposes, students now enrolled—i.e., those through the class of 2028—are grandfathered under the old rules and may still elect to take one Gen Ed course pass/fail, with the instructor’s permission. And under the new rule, if adopted, any student exploring an intellectual interest by taking a course not for Gen Ed credit may still ask permission to enroll in that course on a pass/fail basis.)

Comments from the floor were supportive, some strongly so. One faculty member said that among students opting for pass/fall status, “The amount of work they do drops precipitously.” That, another said, “does change the experience of Gen Ed courses for everybody.” Still another, a former Gen Ed committee co-chair (who met individually with each student requesting pass/fail status to determine the reasons for such requests), said it was “dispiriting” to find course evaluations containing remarks such as, “Why does she take it so seriously? It’s only a Gen Ed class.” Having decided to deny pass/fall status completely this academic year, she said, other students told her the result was “refreshing,” with no distraction from peers who were not taking the course seriously. The result, she said, was to “increase intellectual vitality,” consistent with the CSCC legislation and other FAS actions, and to refocus students’ “attention on the mission of this program”: to prepare them for grappling with the larger challenges they will face as future citizens, rather than simply deepening knowledge of a field through their concentration courses. “If students pay attention,” she said, “they will be rewarded.”

The QRD requirement, enacted in 2019 alongside the current Gen Ed curriculum, also permitted students to elect pass/fail or satisfactory/unsatisfactory enrollment with permission (a deviation from the letter-graded Empirical and Mathematical Reasoning component of the prior Gen Ed program). In parallel with the proposal for all-letter-graded Gen Ed courses, the faculty also heard a proposal that the QRD course requirement be satisfied only with letter-grading. Professor of the practice in statistics Joseph K. Blitzstein presented the recommendation and noted its fit with the faculty’s interest in underscoring intellectual rigor, its rules on other required courses, and the pending Gen Ed proposal. As the QRD committee put it:

In recent years, the Office for Undergraduate Education has been highlighting the importance of re-centering academics and increasing rigor in the classroom experience.…[R]equiring the QRD requirement to be fulfilled with a letter grade is in line with these goals. At present, the Harvard College writing requirement [Expository Writing] and language requirement must be completed with a letter grade, and a proposal to require letter grades for courses taken toward satisfying the General Education requirement is under consideration [as discussed above]. It would therefore be consistent with other College requirements if the QRD requirement were treated similarly.

Those logistical equities aside, the QRD committee had interesting things to say about student preparation and the rigor of their education (emphases added):

The multifaceted, interdisciplinary nature of the QRD requirement provides an additional reason that therequirement should be fulfilled with a letter grade. The QRD requires that a single course include mathematical, computational, and statistical methods, as well as exposure to critical thinking about data. In practice, as the QRD committee has observed…very few QRD-certified courses contain all three of these components to a significant extent. Anecdotally, faculty have expressed that incorporating these wide-ranging elements into a QRD class has become increasingly difficult as the level of overall quantitative readiness among admitted students to Harvard College has dropped in recent years.

As a result of these factors, most QRD courses may have only minor exposure to one of the three methods. While this is acceptable—the committee does not expect a QRD course to comprise equally all three domains—it does have unique implications when considering grading basis. In many QRD courses, a student could easily skip all of the exercises pertaining to one or two of the methods, and still easily meet the bar for obtaining a passing or satisfactory grade. Requiring that the QRD requirement be fulfilled with a letter grade would remove this loophole and would help ensure that student learning is better aligned with the intent of the QRD requirement.…

The committee does acknowledge that taking a QRD course for a letter grade might feel daunting to some [small share, estimated at 10 percent] of students. However, we also recognize that such students, who may be less quantitatively inclined, are the very individuals who arguably stand to gain the most from taking a single QRD class in a rigorous capacity, pushing them beyond their intellectual comfort zones and cultivating skills that they may not encounter elsewhere in their coursework. If we believe in the value of the QRD requirement for all students, then we aspire for all students to graduate having truly met that bar.

Again, the new language, if adopted, will apply to students entering in the next fall semester, with those already enrolled, through the class of 2028, permitted with the instructor’s permission to take their QRD course on a non-graded basis.

The Wider World

The final agenda item before the in camera session was one of FAS’s featured “research minute” presentations during which a colleague briefly describes his or her scholarship. The March 4 speaker was Douglas Melton, a leading stem-cell scientist. As reported, Melton stepped down as Xander University Professor and moved to Vertex Pharmaceuticals, to focus on development of a therapy for diabetes; he has resumed his University affiliation as the first Harvard Catalyst Professor, mentoring students while continuing his private-sector engagements. He described more than two decades of work to program stem cells to develop into pancreatic beta cells (an approach now being tested in a dozen people who have Type 1 diabetes). More pertinently to the current moment, he noted that the basic research underlying his discoveries could only have been done at Harvard, with support from the president’s office at a time when the federal government refused to support science involving human embryonic stem cells. “I’m glad to be part of your community,” he said.

As noted, the faculty’s conversation with President Garber took place behind closed doors, the better to encourage unfettered conversation. So it is unknown what questions were raised, nor how Garber responded.

It is worth noting that in light of recent news from Washington,, Northwestern (February 12), MIT (February 14), and Stanford (February 26)—highly endowed, research-intensive institutions like Harvard—have signaled a period of belt-tightening, by imposing freezes on hiring for non-essential staff positions and other expense controls. (Updated March 6, 2025, 8:00 a.m.: The Yale Daily News has reported that in response to the changed political and fiscal environment, that university will restrain compensation increases, reduce hiring, and reevaluate construction and renovation spending during the next fiscal year.) As the Stanford announcement put it, budgeting for the next academic and fiscal year is taking place in the shadow of “potential financial uncertainties” mounting for all universities. It amplified briskly:

Most recently, as you know, the National Institutes of Health sought to dramatically reduce the payments it makes to universities for the indirect costs associated with research. Though this is currently under review by the courts, a cut of this magnitude would have a significant negative budget impact at Stanford. There is also uncertainty about the level of direct federal funding for scientific research as agencies like NIH and NSF [National Science Foundation] face cuts.

No such announcement has issued from Harvard—yet. But it is known that budget guidance for fiscal year 2025-2026 was revised at the end of January, as the news began pouring forth from Washington, D.C. As Dean Hoekstra noted, units throughout the University have been advised to seek “capacity” in their budgets, through reduced expenses or increased revenues—and to redouble the level of such changes in their outlook for the subsequent year vs. prior expectations. Some such changes might be effected easily, if not painlessly, through reduction or elimination of employee bonuses or compensation cost-of-living adjustments. But over time, a period of financial constraint could point toward reassessing programs, projects, and offices: i.e., the level of Harvard employment and its capital spending.

Whether Harvard is heading in such a direction, and if so, when, is unknown. But there are straws in the wind: the MIT, Northwestern, and Stanford directives at least send a signal to their communities. Another such signal, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education, is in the form of several institutions’ reductions in Ph.D. admissions for next year, given the fear that reduced federal support will make it impossible to pay student stipends from scientific research budgets.

Unlike Brown, Princeton, and Yale, which are completing enormous capital campaigns, Harvard does not now have such an effort underway to buffer its budget. And the abruptly terminated presidency of Claudine Gay, and Alan Garber’s status as a term-limited leader (to June 30, 2027), make even planning such an effort difficult at best. Just as its financial circumstances darken, the University is again at risk, as it was when President Lawrence H. Summers left office prematurely in 2006, of missing an entire fundraising cycle.

So it would not be at all surprising if FAS members sought President Garber’s guidance on the current outlook in Mass Hall and Loeb House, where the Corporation must ultimately approve the delayed Harvard budget for the academic year beginning July 1. Compared to the outlook of only a few months ago, Harvard’s newish senior leadership team—Garber, John Manning (the provost), and Ritu Kalra (vice president for finance and chief financial officer)—must guide the University toward a dramatically more uncertain, and likely challenging, future.