“It kills me to see people compromising, just loafing through their senior year, taking half their courses pass-fail,” he says. “There’s a discourse that’s missing in the air here about what the purpose of an education is.”

He recalls suggesting at a recent Faculty meeting that the College could post a list of three books for students to read over winter break and follow-up with faculty panel discussions of the texts during January Term.

In a program like this, he says, “You’re not going to get any gold stars. It’s not going to go on a special certificate that you did it. You just did it because reading books is a good thing to do.”

EMBRACING INERTIA

But even with initiatives like the one Lewis suggested, some believe that the problems created by the intense focus on grades and GPA will persist.

Though Harris says he would support eliminating Latin honors entirely, he has no intention of bringing the issue forward because he says it is low priority and acknowledges that tradition-steeped systems like Latin honors tend to “run on inertia.”

Despite his criticism of Latin honors, Lewis—who describes himself as a “traditionalist”—says he thinks the system should stay in place.

While he says there is implicit unfairness in a system that can reward students for avoiding risks, he thinks this drawback is mitigated by the fact that a summa degree “isn’t actually worth anything.”

Daniel E. Lieberman, who as chair of the Human Evolutionary Biology department, usually recommends about half of his fifty graduating HEB concentrators for summa cum laude, agrees.

“This is Harvard. We don’t get rid of things,” he says. “We’re always going to try to celebrate students who achieve academically. And there’s nothing wrong with that.”

—Staff writer Rebecca D. Robbins can be reached at rrobbins@college.harvard.edu.