“Students come here and they feel like they have to do a lot of extracurriculars,” says Martin. “[The environment can] have students feeling that if they don’t do something special like running the [Institute of Politics] or something, they’ve failed.”

And that need has hurt undergraduates, Harris says.

“One does have a sense that what students have lost is unstructured time to do nothing,” he says.

The timing and rigidity of the concentrations is also an issue on the minds of those leading the curricular review.

“We ask students to concentrate as if they were mini grad students” notes Harris.

He says he worries that this might limit students’ abilities to study what interests them.

Todd expresses a similar concern.

“Another issue I would like for us to deal with in the reform is working with students to persuade them that they don’t need to be government or biochemistry to be lawyers or doctors,” he says. “They shouldn’t concentrate in something they don’t really want or love.”

Todd also says he thinks students are not given sufficient time to find the right concentration for them.

“Do we require students to declare [concentrations] too rapidly?” he mused. “I’m inclined to think we do.”

The review will also examine the structure of the actual Harvard day.

“Harvard has a very tight schedule,” said Harris, referring to the way most lecture classes are given at 11 a.m., 12 p.m. and 1 p.m. “First of all, it means that students aren’t taking classes they want to take because it conflicts with a course they’re required to take.”

These issues are just a few of those that will be touched upon during the upcoming months.

Full Steam Ahead

All of these discussion items will have been thoroughly hashed out by this time next year, those leading the review predict.