One of the lesser-mentioned casualties of the COVID-19 pandemic here at Harvard College is the practice affectionately known as Shopping Week. For the uninitiated first-years and sophomores, Shopping Week occurred during the first week of each semester. Prior to the official start of classes and course registration deadline, students had the opportunity to “shop,” or sit in on, as many classes as they wanted. They could explore courses and gain exposure to fields of study they might not have otherwise encountered.
But due to remote learning in the fall of 2020, shopping week was replaced with the much less-involved “course preview period,” which has continued ever since. While some students are indifferent about the loss of Shopping Week, a growing contingent sees it as a loss of one of Harvard’s greatest traditions. These students have organized a decentralized and leaderless movement whose name boasts its mission: Save Shopping Week.
The movement began in the summer of 2021 as an effort to determine the student body’s opinion on Shopping Week. “The general consensus was that the undergraduate student body was in favor of it, but we wanted to get concrete numbers,” said LyLena Estabine ’24, Lowell House Undergraduate Council (UC) representative who has been involved in efforts to defend Shopping Week in the past, alongside student body president Michael Cheng ’22. This drive for data culminated in a UC referendum in the fall of 2021, which indicated that 96.46 percent of the 3,167 participating voters were in favor of retaining shopping week. These results inspired members of the movement to keep working to preserve this historic practice.
On December 9, 2021, the Committee on Course Registration, which formed in 2019 to review the current registration system and suggest alternatives, released its report on Shopping Week. In its report, the committee recommended a shift to a pre-registration model beginning in spring 2024. Implemented at a variety of colleges across the U.S, the pre-registration model does not allow students to shop for courses at the beginning of each semester. Instead, they must decide on their schedule during the previous semester and begin classwork in those courses on the first day of class. Advocates for the plan claim that it would prove more efficient and safer than shopping week. Some also claim pre-registration would reduce strain on graduate student Teaching Fellows, as it would grant them extra time to plan their class schedules for the semester.
Members of Save Shopping Week have not been swayed by the proposed pre-registration model. “Under pre-registration, students would only be able to register for four classes in April, so if you wanted to take more than four classes, you’d have to wait until classes actually start,” said Cheng. In his eyes, such a situation would be problematic for students pursuing a concurrent masters’ degree or enrolling in the dual-degree program at Berklee College of Music. Aside from that, he fears the model would prove detrimental to the experience of first-years. “First Generation Low-Income students are not going to necessarily have as much experience picking classes at college,” he said. “And, especially for first-years, given all the helicopter parenting that goes on, it’s not hard to imagine that parents could influence or even end up picking the classes that students take.”
The Save Shopping Week movement also addresses other concerns outlined in the Committee’s report. Both Estabine and Cheng agree the decision to pause shopping week for the duration of the pandemic is appropriate, as students’ safety should be a top priority. The movement has also been working closely with graduate students and faculty members to ensure their needs are met. “We could use this pause on shopping week to reimagine how it could work better,” says Cheng, “not make up excuses to get rid of shopping week altogether and move to a rigid pre-registration system which no one’s really calling for.”
For Estabine and Cheng, Shopping Week is more than a quirky Harvard tradition. It is a physical representation of the University’s commitment to the liberal arts model of education and academic exploration. Further, Shopping Week provides students an opportunity to engage with classes in ways that are less tangible and quantifiable. They argue that some educational factors—such as classroom accessibility and professor-student compatibility—are almost impossible to discern without physically sitting in on a class. “I think the biggest thing lost with a virtual course preview period is that you don’t actually get to try out a class and see how you like it, what the professor is like, and I think that’s the key thing that people loved about Shopping Week,” says Cheng.
However, representatives of Save Shopping Week have had difficulties engaging the student body in their efforts, in part due to a loss of institutional memory. “Now you have students who remember what Shopping Week was because they experienced it, but then you also have current first-years and sophomores who haven’t experienced it,” said Estabine. “They’re less likely to speak out for or against change because they’ve never experienced a normal year, they’ve never experienced what this system was supposed to be like.”
The fight for the future of Shopping Week will pick up steam during the first few weeks of this semester. The pre-registration model proposed by the Committee on Course Registration will be voted on in February by the Faculty Council, a group consisting of Faculty Dean Claudine Gay and eighteen elected voting members of the faculty. “If the FC votes in favor of [the Committee on Course Registration’s proposal], it will go on to the full faculty and be put to a vote in March or April,” Estabine explained. “Then based on what the faculty decides, that will determine the future of our course registration system.”
The movement will continue mobilizing students to exercise their right to oppose changes in the Harvard academic experience. “Universities shouldn’t just be corporate structures that try to maximize efficiency,” says Cheng. “They should be about serving students and their communities. I think a lot about what the Save Shopping Week movement is—decentralized, leaderless—is about trying to ensure that students have a voice in their university and that that is a priority we should have here.”
If readers wish to get involved with Save Shopping Week, Estabine and Cheng encourage them to head to https://www.saveshoppingweek.us/get-involved and follow them on Instagram @saveshoppingweek.
Cade Williams ’23 (cadewilliams@college.harvard.edu) writes News for the Independent.