Harris’s first proposal reformed the selection process by lowering the threshold for summa cum laude candidates from a rate that varied annually between the top four and five percent of students recommended by their concentrations to a fixed rate of five percent.

The change was motivated by what he saw as the “arbitrary feel” of the existing selection system, in which a committee analyzes the GPA data each year to set a minimum threshold within the allocated range.

“If it’s shifting from one year to the next based on where we think we see a gap, it just didn’t feel right to a number of us,” he says.

While Harris admits that the new threshold of five percent is also somewhat arbitrary, he says he thinks the fixed percentage is “clean” and “doesn’t require negotiation.”

Harris also proposed that the distribution requirement—which mandates that students receive at least two A-level grades each in the humanities, the social sciences, and the sciences—be eliminated.

Harris says that the change was prompted by the difficulty of classifying courses within the three categories—a challenge that has been exacerbated by the influx of interdisciplinary courses in the new General Education program.

The reforms come as the latest in a series of minor alterations to a Latin honors system that has stayed largely consistent since its inception after the Civil War. The College has awarded its graduates the highest honor of summa cum laude, followed by magna cum laude, and finally cum laude since the late 19th century.

OPENING UP THE CONVERSATION

In its present incarnation, the honors system has been critiqued by those who say that it fails to reflect the spirit of academic exploration that the College hopes to encourage.

While the changes Harris proposed aim to standardize the system, they do not address the larger question of educational philosophy that Professor of computer science Harry R. Lewis ’68—a former Dean of the College—believes should be raised.

Lewis has criticized the attention paid to GPA and Latin honors on campus, which he says inspires “profoundly anti-educational” behavior among students.

“[The system] incentivizes people when they have a choice between a course they know something about and a course they know nothing about to take the course they already know something about,” he says. “It completely defeats the point of going to college and getting an education.”

Harris echoes Lewis’s sentiment, saying he does not think Latin honors serve a “truly positive purpose.”

“It’s not clear to me that any honors systems actually provide incentives or the ones we’d want,” Harris says.

To solve this problem, Lewis says he believes a campus-wide conversation needs to be launched.