{shortcode-8f2897886594fae61489a05176ddde1679c418e9}

{shortcode-c399856a939a76450d012f8c28f46076ef7d7eea}hen Secretary of Education Linda McMahon froze all future federal grants to Harvard, she justified her actions by saying America’s oldest and most selective university had lost “any semblance of academic rigor.”

“Why is it, we ask, that Harvard has to teach simple and basic mathematics, when it is supposedly so hard to get into this ‘acclaimed university’?” McMahon wrote in reference to an introductory math course launched last year that she derided as “remedial.”

McMahon is not alone in criticizing Harvard’s academic rigor.

Her argument that the University has gone soft on academics echoes long-standing conservative criticisms that Harvard has become too easy — rooted in what they argue is a practice of accepting applicants and promoting faculty for the diversity they bring to campus, rather than their intellectual merit.

Even among Harvard faculty, most of whom are not inclined to sympathize with McMahon or the logic in her letter, separate but related concerns that some students are increasingly putting academics on the back burner are widespread. A January committee report on classroom norms found that students prioritize extracurricular commitments over their classes — a trend, the report’s authors wrote, that most faculty view “with alarm.”

More than a dozen students, faculty, and administrators told The Crimson that they disagreed with McMahon’s suggestion that Harvard students are intellectually weak. But many also conceded that student priorities have shifted.

Amanda Claybaugh, the dean of undergraduate education at Harvard College, said it will take a thoughtful, targeted effort to address the factors — including pre-professionalism, grade inflation, and burnout from a highly selective admissions process — that have pulled students away from the classroom.

“These are all very real issues, and we can’t recenter academics without addressing them all,” she said.

Past the ‘Golden Age’?

During her first year at Harvard, Kyra E. Richardson ’28 took Math MA5: “An In-depth Introduction to Functions and Calculus I,” the course McMahon singled out in her letter.

In Richardson’s rural Alabama hometown, having calculus offered in high school was a “privilege, not a given.” Math MA5 helped her catch up on content she never had the chance to learn.

So when Richardson saw McMahon lambast the rigor of MA5 and the course’s students in the May letter, she was taken aback.

Richardson said the class is “so good for students, not specifically, but especially for students that come from more disenfranchised areas.”

“To sit there and say it’s embarrassing — that students that are in that class don’t deserve to be at Harvard — is incredibly ridiculous,” she added.

McMahon’s criticism of MA5 parroted conservative arguments that the course reflects a worrisome trend at Harvard of lax standards and academically weak students.

But several undergraduates, professors, and administrators said that Harvard’s students are as intellectually talented as in the past, if not more so. Harvard Business School professor William C. Kirby, a former dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, said that “there’s always a temptation to think that there was a golden age of students.”

“But it’s not true,” he added. “I think our students today are the best we’ve ever had.”

Justin Xu ’25 said the establishment of courses like MA5 reflects the fact that Harvard has “a greater spread of people who are interested in different things” today compared to past generations — with more varied areas of expertise necessarily leaving gaps in certain academic subjects.

A student not having learned specific content before college doesn’t undermine their intellectual capabilities, Daniel Lee ’25 said. Lee himself attended an arts-focused high school with a limited math curriculum before arriving at Harvard, where he ultimately concentrated in applied math and took several difficult pure math courses during his time in Cambridge.

“I sympathize with the idea that some students might be less prepared, but I don’t think that means that students won’t ever be able to figure it out,” Lee said.

But even as affiliates defended the intellectual horsepower of Harvard students, they said that over time undergraduates have lost sight of their academic pursuits — drawn away from challenging courses by the allure of an extracurricular landscape that promises pre-professional success.

When Careerism Replaces Curiosity

History professor Derek J. Penslar first taught at Harvard in 2006, before leaving the University for several years. When he returned in 2016, Penslar quickly realized that Harvard’s academic standards had shifted: he could only assign about half the amount of reading and writing he did a decade prior.

“I was essentially told by my colleagues that expectations had changed,” Penslar said.

Penslar’s experience is not an anomaly. Several faculty said that in recent years, Harvard students have noticeably moved their focus from academics to pursuits beyond the classroom, forcing professors to adjust their syllabi accordingly.

“I do think that overall, there has been a bit of a decline in the intensity and the sort of academic level of some of the courses,” Organismic and Evolutionary Biology professor Michael M. Desai said.

Academic disengagement has been highlighted in official reports, too. The January faculty report on classroom norms recommended a slew of changes, urging the FAS to mandate attendance and standardize grading across departments, divisions, and schools.

And a 2023 report on grade inflation, which the University termed “grade compression,” found that grades at the College have risen significantly in the past 20 years — with more than 79 percent of grades now falling in the A range.

Faculty and students pointed to a range of potential catalysts for students’ shift away from academics, from achievable A’s to burnout to a competitive careerist culture.

Romance Languages and Literatures professor Francesco Erspamer, who has taught at Harvard for more than 20 years, said that demanding pre-professional extracurriculars compete for students’ attention. He said dedication to these clubs might be “undermining” the academics that should be central to a university.

Social Studies lecturer Bo-Mi Choi, meanwhile, said that grade inflation — which makes earning even a B-plus an “existential crisis” for students — has made undergraduates “really hesitant to take intellectual risk.”

{shortcode-f315f7a1211bf95d0ed62aa348412b98ab94955e}

Claybaugh argued that the “grueling gauntlet” of Harvard’s ultra-selective admissions process burns students out and diminishes their academic curiosity, leaving undergraduates to see their college courses “as just another set of hoops to jump through” in pursuit of straight A’s.

“They’ve learned, over the years, to think of the classroom as a place of competition, performance, and stress,” she said. “We want to re-awaken in them other feelings: curiosity, wonder, maybe even joy.”

Some students, however, said they have not sacrificed their intellectual curiosity for an easier courseload that falls second to pre-professional pursuits.

Sylvie S. Wurmser ’27, a Social Studies concentrator, said that “the state of academics is as strong as I could ever hope it to be” in her field of study. For Wurmser, factors like grade inflation have not impacted the “intellectual vigor of conversations we’re having.”

“There’s a really sizable proportion of the College that’s here because they’re really interested in learning, and they’re really interested in digging deep into an academic field with the brightest minds in the world,” she said.

Lee said that rather than being mutually exclusive, academics and extracurriculars can jointly reinforce students’ interests.

“Something like religion oftentimes might be considered extracurricular, but I think for me personally, it’s another manifestation of my interest in philosophy,” Lee said.

Others added that this shift away from school is driven by dynamics in the labor market outside the control of Harvard instructors. Sairam Pantham ’28 said that employers in industries like consulting and finance may value candidates’ pre-professional experiences over their GPAs or course rigor.

“I don’t think you can blame the school,” he said. “I think you more so just have to blame the system and just kind of blame the game.”

But faculty and administrators raised concerns that the exploratory element of a Harvard education is lost when students allocate their time to achieving a hyper-specific goal, such as a job or graduate school.

Outgoing College Dean Rakesh Khurana said in a May 20 interview that such a system undermines the core of a liberal arts education. He said that instead of treating college as a “GPS” with a predetermined destination in mind, students should instead use their time at Harvard to “first decide where it is that you want to go.”

‘A Lofty Goal’

The onus to recenter academics at Harvard falls on the faculty, Kirby said.

In his undergraduate courses, Kirby has implemented Harvard Business School’s classroom rules: mandatory attendance, cold-calling, and a ban on electronics. The shift “actually focuses attention a great deal, because students then pay attention to each other,” he said.

“It’s our job, perhaps, to challenge them more,” Kirby added.

But professors said that they often face pushback in the form of harsh student evaluations if they attempt to make their courses more rigorous. Because student assessments of instructors contribute heavily to promotion and hiring decisions, faculty said they can feel pressured to maintain lower standards to appease students.

“Higher education has become like a client-seller situation,” Choi said.

Desai said that while student assessment platforms like Harvard’s Q Guide provide valuable points of information, the College should embrace a wider range of evaluative methods, proposing a peer review system where faculty can weigh in on their colleagues’ courses.

Penslar — who called Harvard’s grading system “broken because of grade compression” — recommended a more drastic overhaul. He said he would prefer that the College mimic schools like the University of Toronto and Oxford University, where grading is far more harsh.

In recent months, Harvard administrators have announced several sweeping changes to increase undergraduate academic rigor and lessen grade inflation.

The College has begun working to compare and adjust grades across courses, according to Claybaugh. Faculty voted overwhelmingly in March to amend the College student handbook to include language stating that “students are expected to prioritize their coursework” — an amendment proposed by the faculty committee on classroom norms.

And professors greenlit proposals in April that eliminated the pass-fail option for courses fulfilling the Harvard College General Education and Quantitative Reasoning with Data requirements.

Psychology professor Fiery A. Cushman ’03, one of the co-chairs of the Gen Ed program, wrote in a statement that the aim of Gen Eds is to “help our students build the habits of thought that make them informed, thoughtful, and active contributors to society.”

The notion that Gen Eds can stand as a cornerstone of Harvard students’ academic experiences has been criticized as “wishful thinking.” But Cushman said the intent behind the program is precisely what could get Harvard students back in the classroom — and perhaps combat the criticisms of academic rigor raised by conservatives and faculty alike.

Pantham said the best thing professors can do to encourage academic engagement would be to set concrete guardrails — like limiting phone usage and expecting students to take notes in class. But in some cases, he said, it may not even be possible for professors to change students’ attitude toward their coursework.

“If a student is going into a class thinking, ‘This doesn’t matter for whatever profession I want to go into, whatever industry I want to go into,’ ultimately, the professor of the class can’t do anything to change the student’s mind,” he said.

Choi said it is this mindset — of seeing higher education as a means to achieve professional success — that can prevent students from realizing the true value of their Harvard educations.

“You get this discourse of, ‘My education is an investment,’ which actually just means you paid something and you want a return on it,” she said. “But that’s not actually what college is about.”

“There are certain impacts, there are certain things — when your mind blows open — that cannot be quantified,” Choi added.

—Staff writer William C. Mao can be reached at william.mao@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @williamcmao.

—Staff writer Veronica H. Paulus can be reached at veronica.paulus@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @VeronicaHPaulus.