I remember well my first brush with tough grading at Harvard—circa 1990, during my first-year Expository Writing course (better known in the College as “Expos”). We had turned in our first assignment, and before the next class session, the instructor pulled me aside. “I’m going to use your essay as an example,” he said. My ego soared until he finished the sentence: “…of what not to do.”
He wasn’t wrong. Buoyed by some bad high school habits, I had apparently written the entire paper in the passive voice. I don’t recall the grade he gave me, but it certainly wasn’t an A. There was no better way to knock that bad habit out of my writing for good.
That was a productive moment of discomfort, the kind of ideal educational experience that Lindsay Mitchell, a onetime Expos teacher and former Harvard Magazine senior editor, describes in her thought-provoking cover story about the costs of Harvard’s current wave of grade inflation (page 24). Mitchell delves beyond stereotypes and reflexive judgments to describe a set of challenges for teachers and students—and for the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) as it works to fine-tune the academic enterprise.
The FAS “re-centering academics” initiative is part self-reflection and part sales job: recasting the purpose of higher education as something less transactional and more transformative. Several stories in this issue explore how students across the University can embrace the possibilities of failure and exploration. Lydialyle Gibson digs into the history and mission of Harvard Extension School, which offers an alternate route to advancement, along with the thrill of knowledge for its own sake (page 30). In his charming Undergraduate column, Andrés Muedano ’27, one of our Ledecky fellows, writes about his efforts to resist the pressure today’s undergraduates feel to instrumentalize every moment (page 56).
What Muedano and Mitchell describe might be an inevitable byproduct of an ever-more-competitive admissions process that not only rewards achievement but also compounds the pressure to do more, faster, without the leeway to stumble or meander. But Dean of Arts and Humanities Sean D. Kelly offers Muedano a different way to view academia: as an opportunity for what Plato called “serious play.” It’s a sunnier metaphor for the work of learning than the “friction” Mitchell describes in her grade inflation story (and that I experienced as a shell-shocked Expos student). Both are useful ways to think about how to spend our precious time in school, and what it means to iterate—in our work, and in our plans.
On the subject of iteration: if you sense something different about this issue, your eyes have not deceived you. We’ve changed our section titles to make their contents clearer: “Arts & Culture,” “Research & Ideas,” “People & Passions.” (We are fans, here, of the ampersand.) We’ve also adjusted our print size and some of our typefaces for the sake of greater readability. And we’re introducing some new recurring features that will highlight the wide-ranging experiences and interests of Harvard alumni. Feedback is welcome, whether positive or critical. It’s all part of the process.
