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Harvard administrators seem to have forgotten that a university is supposed to help its students.

Over the last year, the College has made it clear that it is determined to revamp students’ education and revitalize the academic mission. College Dean Rakesh Khurana recently said that one of his top priorities is “recentering academics,” while the Classroom Social Compact Committee made waves with its report claiming that many “students do not prioritize their courses.”

There is certainly a lot that Harvard can do to improve students’ education and experience. Unfortunately, it seems to be intent on doing the opposite.

First, the College would be mistaken to believe that students don’t engage with their classes. A recent Crimson op-ed analyzing Q guide data found that, on average, Harvard undergraduates work 6.5 hours per week outside of the classroom on each course. A student with that workload taking four classes that each have two one-hour-and-fifteen-minute lectures and a one-hour section every week — a common course load — spends 40 hours a week on their academics. That’s literally double the average for college students reported in a 2018 study.

Of course, nobody should be surprised that Harvard students are so hard-working.

Nonetheless, there has been a lot of hubbub about extracurriculars. Given how much time students put into their academics, though, clubs look a lot less concerning. If a student works 40 hours on their course load, who cares what they do after. Work hard, play hard.

Moreover, students learn a great deal from their extracurriculars, whether it’s playing in an orchestra, performing in a play, being published in a research journal or law review, running a business, or even writing an op-ed. And that’s not mentioning the critical role that organizations play for students’ social lives.

Regardless, Harvard alumni do pretty well. I’m skeptical that students aren’t learning something beneficial during their time here.

Evidently, students are engaging with both their extracurriculars and their academics. So unless the College purports that extracurricular activities aren’t valuable to a student’s education, it should not unnecessarily drown students in superfluous coursework.

Unfortunately, the College has put forward policies attempting to do just that. In the last year or so, the General Education program announced guidelines to make grading harder and proposed eliminating the option to pass-fail its courses.

These initiatives are gravely misguided. Even if students weren’t engaged with their courses — despite apparently spending 40 hours a week on them — these changes wouldn’t solve the problem.

Rather than blaming students and suffocating them with excessive assignments, Harvard should focus on the causes of disengagement that it can control.

For one, the College could push course registration back from midterm season so students have the time to find interesting courses. Harvard could also improve classes by encouraging professors to use active teaching methods or cover more engaging topics instead of the hyper-specific Gen Eds we currently have. It could even adopt an open curriculum like Brown University.

And if the College administration truly wants to improve the education and experience of its students, it needs to remember that teachers are central to its work. Hence, the University should abolish the time caps that artificially expel our teachers and sever student relationships.

Not long ago, there was a time that Harvard knew it needed to truly engage with students to fix issues. After the 2012 Government 1310 cheating scandal, the College created the Honor Council — which included student representation — in an attempt to ameliorate academic dishonesty. Now, we face a similar problem with the Administrative Board.

The College can try to regulate students all it wants, but that alone won’t suffice. If Harvard wants to see improvements to classroom culture, it needs to listen to students and allow them to share in the responsibility of governing our community.

And if reforming academics to be beneficial for the students is too much, there are so many other small things Harvard could do to show that it cares about its students — like giving us free printing and laundry, getting rid of midterms on housing day, and simply ceasing its attempts to restrict the student experience at the Harvard-Yale game.

Harvard’s mission is to help students achieve an academic, social, and personal transformation. While the College has needlessly zeroed in on making the academic realm inordinately demanding, it does so at the expense of the other — arguably more important — transformations.

So even though the administration may claim otherwise, don’t believe anyone who tells you that Harvard’s too easy.

Matthew R. Tobin ’27, a Crimson Editorial editor, is a double concentrator in Government and Economics in Winthrop House.