Shopping Week was killed by an administration more concerned with Teaching Fellows’ schedules than students, and now students’ schedules are suffering.
Last spring, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) voted to end Harvard College’s long-standing flexible week of class registration known as Shopping Week in favor of a far more opaque and restrictive pre-registration process. Sometimes you need to lose something to miss it, and this semester, the shadow of Shopping Week looms large over Harvard’s return to Covid-free education. This decision has created a rift between faculty and students.
The conspiracy to kill Shopping Week started in 2018 when then-Dean of Undergraduate Education Amanda Claybaugh claimed that she was “no longer certain that the benefits of the shopping period are worth the costs.” In the three years of discussion following that claim, the debate has primarily centered around the administrative burden of Shopping Week versus the benefits of student’s obtaining a well-rounded education. Registration period without Shopping Week reveals that the debate should be about who the stakeholders in modern higher education are and whether veritas is still respected by Harvard’s administration.
In this case, identifying the stakeholder is straightforward: the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. They made the decision unilaterally as a body, with a faculty vote that was so influenced by internal politics the outcome seemed obvious. The pretense to accommodate students’ opinions ended after they decided to replace a student-led town hall in the 11th hour with a Faculty-led “listening session”. Unfortunately, the result of the vote to end Shopping Week demonstrated a growing dissonance between the student body and faculty.
According to the charter, the Harvard faculty exists to teach. The theory is noble: in service to knowledge the greatest minds in academia choose to lower themselves to the level of students. As a common myth, professorship is a sacrifice because the student comes first. Indeed, the FAS should be for the College, not the College for the FAS. And yet this conflict shows that our ideal of education is disintegrating; the death of Shopping Week is a small symptom of a larger systemic illness. Instead of moving towards the myth, our faculty is departing for a cold capitalist reality. While the increasing capitalization and growth of the College’s assets should signal more academic opportunities for students across the board, we have witnessed the balance sheet elevated above the student.
Graduate students who work as Teaching Fellows are the justification for this clear balance sheet prioritization that advocates for the end Shopping Week movement. From a birds eye-view, the sudden care for graduate students by the exact institution that forces them to exist in a state of precarity is at best hypocritical. If the well-being of graduate students was a priority, why avoid strengthening non-discrimination procedures that the Graduate Student Union asked for? This measure saves the College money by allowing them to optimize their payments to graduate students while consenting to new non-discrimination procedures. In a sense, this is the worst possible veil to pull over the student’s eye because it situates the graduate students as a buffer between undergraduates and the administration. By pitting two tuition-paying populations (graduates and undergraduates) against each other to achieve the administration’s goal, it’s clear at least some professors have studied the British colonial strategy of divide and rule.
The misalignment between students and the FAS is only set to get worse. In the current system where some students pay tuition, some students take on debt to pay tuition and even some families donate to demonstrate a student’s commitment to the school, some students feel the College is obligated to them. They are paying for a service. This orientation engenders the type of entitlement that is laced within this very article.
“Shopping Week meant that there was less predictability, but it honored the organic, free spirit embedded in our humanity,” the former President of the Undergraduate Council, Michael Chen ’24, wrote in an email to the Independent. “In contrast, pre-registration treats people as numbers to algorithmically place into classes, makes course selection even more dependent on high-stakes online course reviews, and mandates course information and sign ups months before most professors and TFs can realistically finalize it.”
At the same time that students expect more, the share of Harvard University revenue that is represented by tuition is decreasing every year. Last year, the figure stood at just 10%. Simultaneously, applications to the College are skyrocketing, and admission is becoming more competitive. The professors within the FAS will be paid regardless of the quality of student education, and students will demand education as its price skyrockets. This can of worms is primed to explode and Shopping Week is only the first of the worms to slither out.
Divergence between students’ interests and faculty interests is a negative feedback loop since students continue to lose leverage as the FAS takes away more hallmarks of a liberal arts education. The depressing end of this zero-sum game can only be restored by an appeal to the nature of education itself. Can the faculty value truth over money?
Noah Tavares ’24 (noahtavares@college.harvard.edu) pretends flexibility matters despite filling his schedule with concentration requirements.