“96 PERCENT of undergraduates reportedly wished to retain the existing [shopping week] system.” The faculty voted 3 to 2 to abolish shopping period (see harvardmag.com/shop-denouement-22). As retired CEO of a successful private company, the most important lesson I learned was unabashed customer-centric focus. Yet this faculty expressly ignored its customers. It is a big, inexcusable, and unforced error.
During the 1967 fall shopping week, I “sampled” Edward Banfield’s first-time course on urban studies (affectionately known among students as “Trash Cans”) that ultimately led to his book, The Unheavenly City. I was curious, but would not have enrolled under the new system. The first course meeting was in a tiny classroom in Harvard Hall. After multiple moves, the roughly 500 students who ultimately took the course moved en masse to Sanders Theater. The course was the college’s second largest that semester after Economics 1.
Administratively and otherwise inconvenient for the professor, the College, and everyone? Of course! However, Banfield not only lectured but (despite the class size) routinely took challenging questions and graciously debated all. Ultimately, he became my mentor and I, his summer research assistant. For me and many others, it was the “best course at Harvard.”
On and off over 50 years, I have interviewed Harvard College applicants. Often they ask about Harvard’s size and bureaucracy (including how people sign up for courses). Their faces light up in disbelief and excitement when I talk about shopping week. I guess I’ll have to stop telling them.
Mark Petri ’69, J.D. ‘75
Nashotah, Wisc.
I READ ON page 23 of the May-June issue that the Faculty of Arts and Sciences has approved “double concentrations.” I have been serving as an academic dean in the College of Letters and Science at UC Berkeley (Berkeley) for the last seven years and can pass along some real-world reflections on what is likely to happen as a result of authorizing this change, and why. Berkeley has allowed double majors (with a maximum of two shared courses) for at least the past 40 years. Graduation requirements are roughly the same as Harvard’s. Multiple majors were not common before 2004, when the numbers began to rise rapidly, going from about 3 percent to 7 percent of upper-division undergraduates by 2010. The figure is now about 14.7 percent.
Some students choose wisely; many do not. Two of the chief values of attending a comprehensive research institution as an undergraduate are to take advantage of the unusual breadth and depth of course offerings and of the opportunity to be instructed by faculty members at the leading edge of their own fields. For many students who pursue double majors, these opportunities are sharply reduced. Although ideally a double concentration would allow a student to study in depth more than one field of knowledge, say, astronomy and Chinese literature, the majority of students at Cal choose closely related majors, mathematics and statistics, or comparative literature and French. This overlap is comfortable for many students who expect only good grades in their favorite disciplines. But it is ruinous to their gaining knowledge outside those fields. A major in economics and statistics, for instance, will have to take 23 courses to complete both majors which, with the required nine general education and breadth courses, will use up all 32 courses in their undergraduate career. Worse, if the fields are closely related, most of the four or five lower-division courses required for each major will involve heavily overlapping intellectual material delivered via large lecture courses. Such a student will have no opportunity to take a course in theater or astronomy, no opportunity to participate in education abroad, and little opportunity to get to know other students in areas outside their own fields.
Comprehensive arts and science institutions, as Berkeley and Harvard see themselves to be, give in to the pressure to evolve into trade schools at their peril. The irony is that students operate on a folkloric basis, believing that there is some intrinsic value to having two fields stamped on one’s diploma. Were I in charge of the universe, double majors would be allowable only if they were in different intellectual areas: French and economics or physics, OK, French and Spanish, NO. My impression from dealing with students who have fallen into academic trouble of some kind while pursuing double (or triple, or more) majors is that the intellectual and educational costs to the student for pursuing closely related double majors at a place like Berkeley or Harvard are likely to be far higher than the benefits, although the students are unlikely to take those costs into account.
Daniel F. Melia ’66, Ph.D. ‘72
Professor emeritus rhetoric and Celtic studies
Assistant dean, College of Letters and Science
University of California, Berkeley