Harvard Promises a Liberal Arts Education . Let Make Sure It Delivers . | Opinion

thecrimson.com · Mar 2, 2026 · Collected from GDELT

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Former University President A. Lawrence Lowell, Class of 1877, argued that “a well-educated man must know a little bit of everything and one thing well.”That quote has served many an editor opining in this newspaper on the state of liberal arts education. Today, it serves this editor in advocating a more narrow reform: the Faculty of Arts and Sciences should approve the launch of a proposed “Energy, Climate, and Environment” concentration for the 2026-27 school year. The concentration — so long as it follows through on its promising goals — will bring Harvard closer to its aim of a broad, interdisciplinary liberal arts education.Roughly a century after Lowell established the precursors to the concentrations and distribution requirements we know today, Harvard only vaguely embodies his promising vision. General Education classes — supposedly the “crown jewel” of a student’s liberal arts education, according to one professor — are often plagued by lax grading and low levels of student engagement.Similarly, the increasing popularity of the double concentration since its introduction in 2022 only further limits the electives students can explore. In turn, this trend exacerbates the pressure to fill an already limited number of elective slots with pre-professional or technical classes.Specialization in education isn’t always a bad thing — after all, any concentration structures students’ learning around one academic field. Rather, the problem lies in hyperfocusing on technical skills or highly focused subfields, which means students run the risk of neglecting the most important, broadly applicable lesson of a liberal arts education: to learn not simply facts, but rather how to think.Indeed, one would be hard-pressed to think of a period in Harvard’s history when learning the art of thinking was as critical as it is now, in the age of generative artificial intelligence. Computer science, for instance, teaches you not to be the next Google software engineer, but to respond to future paradigm shifts that automate hard-learned technical skills.Following this logic, the launch of ENCE is an important step in the right direction. The proposed concentration would be interdisciplinary, integrating approaches to real-world climate challenges from the sciences, social sciences, and humanities. Concentrators would survey a little bit of everything in order to understand one issue really well.That will bring us closer to former President Lowell’s vision, but, to be clear, the FAS should not write the ENCE’s heads a blank check. Some details about the concentration, including its four proposed tracks — ranging from Science and Engineering for Sustainable Solutions at SEAS to Nature, Ethics and the Human Imagination in the Arts and Humanities Division — remain unclear.If concentrators were allowed, for instance, to take the majority of their ENCE courses in the FAS department that hosts their track, Harvard would effectively be creating four separate, narrow concentrations that share little more than an introductory course.Instead, the FAS should approve a version of ENCE that requires concentrators to complete a breadth of courses across departments, ensuring a wide interdisciplinary background alongside the narrower requirements of each track.Of course, ENCE is not a panacea for the decline of the liberal arts at Harvard. Even if done right, it’s only one concentration out of a potential fifty-one. Harvard students love to complain — often with good reason — about administrative inaction, but interdisciplinary learning is an area where the power to make a change is genuinely in our hands.Thus, the onus of ensuring that students leave the College with a broad competence across multiple fields does not fall on administrators alone. That applies even to students outside of ENCE-like concentrations, such as Applied Math, which also mandate heavy introductory and breadth courses in addition to a more specialized track.Moreover, with impending grade deflation — 20 percent plus four cap on A’s or not — lower pressure to score a perfect GPA allows us to challenge ourselves with classes outside our comfort zones — that is, classes from disciplines we don’t know that much about.A true liberal arts education does not demand that a student fill every Divisional Distribution and elective slot with upper-level courses in Biomedical Engineering or Social Anthropology. For a Neuroscience concentrator, it might mean satisfying a long-held curiosity with an introductory course in Comparative Study of Religion. For an intended Government concentrator like me, it means taking Math 21A: “Multivariable Calculus,” despite a less-than-stellar high school calculus record.As a recent op-ed argued, it will likely take years for academic culture on campus to shift, and any such shift will be a joint product of changes in student thinking and College policy nudges. A well-constructed ENCE concentration can be the first action towards realizing Lowell’s bold vision.Sometimes, problems have an easy fix — they just require identification. Let academic over-specialization be one of them.Michael Isayan ’29, a Crimson Editorial editor, lives in Apley Court.