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Since Inauguration Day in January, Harvard has endured an onslaught of attacks from the Trump administration. Yet, in the University’s attempts to manage the fallout, Harvard has lost sight of the true goal of a liberal arts education — to acquire the tools not only to exist in society, but to criticize it.

A little over a year ago, I was sitting in Sanders Theater, decked out in red, white, and blue, watching all seven swing states fall to President Trump on election night. After that night, I — along with many other students — was thrust into the crossfire of political warfare.

Since then, a kind of cultural revolution has taken place at Harvard. Mainstream media and the Trump administration have begun to question the University’s legitimacy. Seemingly in response, the University has decentered values of diversity, equity, and inclusion, distanced itself from certain scholarship, and, most recently, committed itself to fighting grade inflation. But Harvard’s public-facing crisis requires more than performative politics; it demands students capable of becoming independent thinkers who question the world around them. This revolution begins with interdisciplinary, rigorous General Education.

To see where Gen Eds ought to go, it helps to look at their past. In 1936, in the midst of rising fascism, former Harvard President James B. Conant decried the “wave of anti-intellectualism” disseminating across the world. That same year, the Nazi Party continued to “Hitlerize” Germany’s universities, purging professors who refused to promote ideas of racial purification, granting sympathizers to leadership positions and silencing dissidents. Nine years later, following Allied victory, Harvard released a report titled “General Education and the Free Society,” with the hope of catalyzing a reflection on societal values in the postwar era.

Perusing through the list of Gen Ed courses in the course catalog, it’s clear that Harvard has strayed far from General Education’s noble goals. Topics are niche — consider “Anime as Global Popular Culture” and “The Power and Beauty of Being In-Between: The Story of Armenia” — lectures tend to be fairly large, and sections often lack critical engagement with the broader themes that such courses aim to define.

Harvard itself recognizes the symptoms of this curricular failure: supposedly, students no longer prioritize coursework. Participation is dwindling, and some students feel uncomfortable expressing controversial opinions in the classroom. Dean of Undergraduate Education Amanda Claybaugh recently released a report on grade inflation at Harvard. While it seems to recommend raising the standards required to achieve an A, the report, surprisingly, fails to mention General Education at all.

Not too long ago, Harvard abandoned General Education entirely. In 1978, Harvard implemented a Core Curriculum, responding to radical countercultural movements of the 1960s that insisted that there was no one true lens with which to view the world. The Core required students to take courses across Literature and Arts, Historical Study, Social Analysis, Moral Reasoning, Science, and Foreign Cultures. But thirty years later, Harvard returned to General Education, arguing that globalization and interdisciplinarity in academia demanded the University to “engage with forces of change.” Again and again, as our cultural priorities shifted, the pedagogy of General Education shifted with them.

The current political moment demands more from General Education courses. Before Harvard can criticize students’ ability to think critically, it must first give them a place to critically think. Before the University can place blame on students for a lack of engagement with difficult ideas, it must give students a platform with which to engage. By introducing only superficial changes designed to create grade separation without re-examining the structure of classes themselves, Harvard only pushes students further away from the academic focus it seeks to obtain.

So when students continue to prioritize extracurriculars over academic work, who can blame them? When General Education classes essentially provide only surface-level introductions to complex topics – and demand only surface-level engagement in return — it’s only fitting that students look beyond the classroom for meaningful intellectual and civil participation. In fact, just this past year some students began working for Cambridge City Council campaigns, feeling the increased weight of politics in the light of Trump’s attacks on Harvard. These opportunities often fill the gap that exists between amorphous classwork and a substantive dialogue with our broader world.

While we’re far from the liberal education movement of the postwar era, Harvard faces another inflection point. Yet again, demands for allegiance to the federal government and condemnation of those who refuse to comply is defining the landscape of higher education. But how can students combat the forces threatening our democracy if we never learned how to recognize them in the first place?

From responding to fascism, to reacting to radical counterculture, to contending with the interconnectedness of our world, our curriculum has always responded to the political moment.

Our required courses represent not just what Harvard feels every student should take from their education, but also how it feels we can best serve the world.

The image of education that Claybaugh's new grading report poses only pulls students further away from the vision of free thought and intellectual exchange that General Education once spearheaded. As students seek an avenue to respond to the turmoil before them, Harvard’s curriculum must adapt – or risk becoming obsolete altogether.

Sylvia A. Langer ’28, a Crimson Editorial editor, is a Molecular and Cellular Biology concentrator in Currier House.