Last month, Bloomberg published a photograph it took this spring of a planning board in Dean of Undergraduate Education Amanda Claybaugh’s office. It offers a window into what her office accomplished last year and what lies ahead as the new academic year begins this week.
Four large yellow cards list the Office of Undergraduate Education’s (OUE) core priorities: “Intellectual Vitality,” “First-Year Writing,” “Re-Centering Academics,” and “Generative AI.” Each is surrounded by sticky notes with specific projects. Pink stickies mark finished items; green ones mark work yet to be completed.
Taken as a whole, the board suggests OUE understands something important: changing the College’s academic culture requires sustained work beyond changing any one policy or program.
Last Year: New policies, programs, and expectations
From the start of the academic year, Claybaugh and College Dean David Deming made “recentering academics” — the College’s push to restore rigor and make academics more central to undergraduate life — a clear priority. OUE’s grading report in October gave faculty a common factual basis for discussing grade inflation (including that roughly 60% of grades in the 2024-25 academic year were A’s). In May, faculty approved a new framework capping A’s at 20% of course enrollment plus four additional students and replacing GPA with an Average Percentile Rank (APR) system for determining internal honors and prizes.
On generative AI, OUE required every undergraduate course to publish its own AI policy, without prescribing what those policies should say. Each professor had to decide whether and how AI fit into their course, while OUE’s AI summit for College students also brought student perspectives into the discussion.
Some of OUE’s work to foster intellectual vitality — work that was unfinished when Bloomberg photographed the board — since moved forward. This summer, every incoming College student was required to complete new constructive disagreement and open inquiry modules.
The Year Ahead: Turning them into culture change
Those accomplishments reset community expectations, brought faculty and students into conversations, and established new structures where College-wide action was needed. But plenty of work also remained around OUE’s same priorities.
At the time Bloomberg photographed the board, OUE’s green stickies included new faculty orientation on re-centering academics, multiple rounds of outreach to faculty around generative AI, and a report on Intellectual Vitality. While these initiatives are less likely to attract national coverage than a new grading policy, they are what helps new policies actually take hold.
The range of OUE’s tactics reflects a broader reality of cultural change: the office can set new rules and expectations, but cultural change comes from what faculty and students do once those structures are in place. A student can complete a module on constructive disagreement and open inquiry, for example, but a flourishing culture of intellectual vitality also depends on whether students apply what they’ve learned when disagreement arises in a classroom or dining hall.
That’s what makes OUE’s approach encouraging. It has paired new policies with efforts to build shared understanding of problems each priority is meant to address, reinforce those priorities through multiple channels, engage faculty and students to understand what changes are and aren’t working, and adjust accordingly. OUE’s particular tactics may change as new challenges emerge, but what matters is whether it keeps returning to those priorities as it responds.
OUE’s progress last year gives reason to think it will. In one year, the College went from publicly confronting problems in its academic culture like its “shadow system of distinction,” to having new infrastructure, policies, and programs to address them. The opportunity now is for Harvard College to build on that progress — sustaining the same focus long enough for those changes to take root in its culture.
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Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) ultimately eliminated 165 roles, or about 10% of positions that were in-scope for its restructuring — substantially below the roughly 25% figure The Crimson previously reported as a high-end estimate. FAS’s final headcount reduction may also end up even lower than 10%, because employees whose positions were eliminated are eligible to apply for the restructuring’s newly created positions.
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Events
Chicago, IL — September 16 from 5:00-7:00 p.m. CT: The Harvard Club of Chicago is hosting FAS government professor Eric Beerbohm, who is Faculty Director of the Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics and FAS Senior Adviser on Civil Discourse, to discuss the state of civil discourse at Harvard and in higher ed. Register here.
Cambridge, MA — September 17 from 4:20-6:00 p.m. ET: Meet Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) Dean Jeremy Weinstein (PhD ’03) at this HKS on the Road series event. The event will be followed by HKS’s annual Malcolm H. Wiener Lecture in International Political Economy, this year featuring Nicholas Kristof (AB ‘82). Register here.
Virtual — September 22 from 12:00 p.m.-1:00 p.m. ET: The Harvard Alumni Association is hosting President Alan Garber (AB ’76, PhD ’82) for an off-the-record conversation about the University’s priorities, progress on campus, and Garber’s vision for Harvard’s future. Register here.
FYIs
DOJ Appeals Dismissal of Antisemitism-Related Title VI Lawsuit Against Harvard
On Thursday, the Department of Justice (DOJ) moved to appeal Judge Richard Stearns’s dismissal of its federal lawsuit accusing Harvard of antisemitism-related violations of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The appeal will go to the Court of Appeals for the First Circuit.
Earlier this month, Stearns dismissed the suit after finding the government hadn’t plausibly alleged an ongoing Title VI violation. The government’s complaint focused largely on examples from the 2023-2024 academic year, with its latest allegations in March 2025 (three months before the government informed Harvard of its noncompliance through a Notice of Violation in June 2025).
Stearns wrote that Title VI enforcement is intended to “incentivize [a school] to bring itself into compliance,” not to “penalize a wayward funding recipient,” and the government alleged no examples of noncompliance after providing that Notice.
This appeal adds a third dispute between Harvard and the federal government before the First Circuit. The government is also appealing rulings in Harvard v. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) over the government’s funding freeze, and Harvard v. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) over the government’s revocation of Harvard’s ability to enroll international students.
Both of those appeals have completed initial briefing and now have oral argument dates: Harvard v. HHS on October 5 and Harvard v. DHS on October 6.
Harvard College Considers Automatically Converting A’s to A-’s To Enforce Grading Cap
Harvard College is considering automatically converting every A in a course to an A- if a faculty member submits A grades above the College’s new cap of 20% of enrollment plus four additional students.
According to The Crimson, Dean of Undergraduate Education Amanda Claybaugh (PhD ‘01) described the mechanism to Peer Advising Fellows as something the College “will” use, but later clarified that it remains only a proposal under review.
Under the possible system, faculty who exceed a course’s limit on A’s would first receive an alert asking them to revise their grades. If they still submitted too many A’s, all A grades in the course would be converted to A-’s.
Roughly 70% of faculty approved the new grading policy in May. It will formally take effect in the 2027-28 academic year, though administrators are encouraging faculty to begin following it this fall.
MIT Releases Report on AI, Recommends “Pro-Learner” Reform With Pedagogical and Infrastructure Changes
MIT released a report this week examining how generative AI is affecting its teaching, learning, and research, with recommendations on how the university should respond. The report was written by a committee of 12 MIT faculty and 6 students and staff members.
The committee’s overall approach is that AI should add to, rather than replace, the work students are expected to do themselves. It says MIT should make AI “pro-learner” — “not to replace the ‘hard fun’ of thinking, learning, creating, and problem solving, but to expand what’s possible for students to think about, learn, and solve.”
The committee rejects a single MIT-wide AI policy because a “uniform Institute-wide rule would inevitably be too permissive for some contexts and too restrictive for others,” though it recommends MIT provide a “menu” of common policies, disclosures, and standards departments could choose from.
The committee recommends that faculty pair longer form, “out-of-class assignments” with more in-person assessments such as “in-class conversations” or oral exams. The committee says that shifting more weight to timed exams alone could discourage students from spending time on the “difficult, time-intensive” problem sets that “build the ladder to mastery.”
The committee also recommends expanding experiential and project-based learning and giving greater weight to work portfolios. The report cites Harvard Business School professor Raffaella Sadun, who said workers who succeed with AI will be those who can “creatively think about ways in which AI can generate value” and test ideas through “experimentation and validation.”
The committee doesn’t recommend capping the number of A’s instructors can reward, explaining that doing so could “intensify the temptation to cut corners on actual learning by increasing reliance on AI.” Instead, it recommends that MIT “explore alternative systems of grading and assessment” like the UK system or “competency-based and mastery-based assessments.” This is a different approach from Harvard’s new grading framework, which caps A’s at 20% of course enrollment plus four additional students, and is designed to incentivize and recognize extraordinary distinction.
The report calls for new infrastructure to help faculty (and MIT at large) adapt. Recommendations include appointing AI Leads in schools and departments; creating an AI Implementation Team and AI Fellows program for graduate students, postdocs, staff, and some undergraduates to help faculty adapt their courses to “make the most of the latest AI technology”; launching an AI Pilot Fund for curricular experiments; and establishing “communities of practice” where faculty can share approaches to teaching with and around AI.
UChicago Moves Undergraduate Social Sciences Core to Device-Free, AI-Free Model
The University of Chicago’s Social Sciences Core — part of its required undergraduate general education curriculum — will shift to an “analog” model starting this fall. Courses will generally be device-free, with students reading course texts on paper and completing coursework without AI assistance. The policy also requires in-person attendance and prohibits recording classes.
A memo from Social Science Division Master Jenny Trinitapoli says faculty reached a “strong consensus” behind the policy, because it puts “a clear focus on what we want [students] to be doing in three courses that they take in their academic career . . . reading on their own, thinking for themselves, and engaging with their fellow students in conversations that really matter.”
The memo also says AI-assisted grading “has no place” in the Core unless faculty are specifically testing its validity against human grading. It also says students can expect grading and feedback from instructors rather than teaching assistants or interns.
In June, UChicago Law School announced device-free classrooms and predominantly in-person exams for first-year courses.
More News
More News at Harvard
New York Times: “Harvard Is Selling a $699 Course Taught by A.I. Clones of Its Faculty”
Financial Times: “Harvard Business School explored European outpost after Trump’s visa threats”
Poets & Quants: “Francesca Gino Tells Court Harvard ‘Tries To Completely Sidestep’ The Central Question In Her Case” — feat. former HBS professor Francesca Gino’s ongoing lawsuit against Harvard over its revocation of her tenure
The Crimson: “HUPD Lifts Shelter-in-Place After Police Detain Man Armed With Machete”
The Crimson: “The Future of the Liberal Arts Lies Beyond Harvard’s Gates” — op-ed by Victoria Dolan (AB ‘28)
More News Beyond Harvard
New York Times: “College Applications Are Changing Again, Thanks to A.I. and Politics”
American Economic Review: “How Test-Optional Policies in College Admissions Disproportionately Harm High-Achieving Applicants from Disadvantaged Backgrounds”
New York Times: “Judge Rules Trump Unlawfully Targeted Foreign Students Who Criticized Israel”
Cornell Daily Sun: “‘Students Not Bombs’: Student Coalition Demands Cornell Divest from Israel”
The Daily Pennsylvanian: “Penn Begins Enforcing Math Course Prerequisites”
Columbia Daily Spectator: “Mnookin Appoints Presidential Task Force to Review University Senate”
Jewish Insider: “Brandeis Center Urges DOJ to Investigate Whether Northwestern Is Acting as Foreign Agent for Qatar”
UC Berkeley: “UC Berkeley Academic Senate Task Force Report on Free Speech, Academic Freedom, and Campus Climate in Higher Education”
Brown Daily Herald: “External review finds Dec. 13 shooting likely could not have been prevented”
Inside Higher Ed: “International Student Rule Already Spurring Disenrollments”
STAT News: “Former Stanford President Releases Emails to Rebut Fraud and Cover-Up Allegations in New Book”
Inside Higher Ed: “Cornell Hopes to Turn Cheating Into Teachable Moment”
Cornell Daily Sun: “Cornell Launches AI Critical Literacy Program for All First-Year Undergraduate Students”
Bloomberg: “University of California Offloads $1 Billion of Private Equity Stakes”
Chronicle of Higher Education: “Curious, Confident, Afraid: A Roomful of Academics Greets the Future of AI”
The Daily Pennsylvanian: “Mapping the Most Popular Undergraduate Majors at Penn”
Chronicle of Higher Education: “Professors Were Singled Out for Using AI in Public Writing. Now They're Defending Themselves.” — feat. HKS professor Ricardo Hausmann
Inside Higher Ed: “Commencement Speakers’ Politics Vary by Institution Type”
Sensible Medicine: “The New England Journal Failed in Editorial Oversight of a Recent Voices Column on Jason Arday” — by Jeffrey Flier, HMS professor, former HMS Dean, and co-president of Harvard’s Council on Academic Freedom
Derek Muller’s Substack: “Which Law Schools Produce the Most Law Professors?” — by Notre Dame Law professor Derek Muller
Kyle Saunders’s Substack: “Let’s Talk Course AI Policy” — by Colorado State University professor Kyle Saunders
New York Times: “There’s Really Only One Way to Stop Students From Cheating” — op-ed by Wharton professor Adam Grant (AB ‘03)
Wall Street Journal: “Jason Arday and What's Wrong With DEI” — op-ed by Harvard economics professor Roland Fryer
Washington Post: “Dear Universities: Don't Want to Be Neutral? Admit It.” — op-ed by Heterodox Academy President John Tomasi and Harvard School of Public Health professor Tyler VanderWeele (PhD ‘06)