Open letter on TFUAP’s changes to the science requirement
Despite other welcome changes, the proposal could hurt natural science education at MIT
Dear MIT community,
We have long benefitted from our Institute’s commitment to giving students a broad background in science and technology to tackle the world’s largest problems. Our General Institute Requirements (GIRs) have been an integral part of this commitment since our founding, and have served as an important signal to the outside world of the values of one of the world’s foremost academic institutions.
However, in light of the recent task force proposal for the reform of the undergraduate syllabus, the authors fear that this commitment is being threatened at MIT. These changes include the end of Physics II: Electricity and Magnetism (8.02) as a requirement (other than for students with 8.01 credit) and increased flexibility with the chemistry and biology requirements (as few as six units of each will be required). The proposal would allow students to substitute biology and chemistry, in particular, with classes in computation and statistics. In addition, the committee has recommended the end of the Institute lab requirement and a shift toward faculty-mentored Undergraduate Research Opportunities (UROPs), which will have an outsized impact on the large labs where thousands of MIT students have received practical instruction in the natural sciences. We welcome a great number of the task force’s changes, including restricting phone use in class and emphasizing teamwork-based classes, but cutting science from the required curriculum is not one of them. The reduction of the science breadth requirement alarms us because we feel it would inadvertently disincentivize exploratory learning and interdisciplinary thought in a way that goes against the spirit of this institution.
Especially during a tumultuous period in the history of American higher education that has seen universities around the nation struggle to maintain funding and independence, one must wonder why MIT is inflicting these drastic changes onto itself. By no means are we blind followers of tradition. We understand the popular perception of America’s top universities as closed-off, stuffy places and have no intent to exacerbate it. We additionally acknowledge that technology has changed and so have the requirements to be STEM-literate, and that the GIRs should change accordingly. However, despite the value of computation and statistics, it is not clear to the authors why incorporating these topics into the undergraduate syllabus necessarily means less education in physics, biology, and chemistry. Indeed, based on a quick glance at public ASE data from the last few years, far more students arrive at MIT with a strong foundation in mathematics and computer science than in the natural sciences. To not require natural science courses, then, is to discourage students from pursuing an intellectual challenge. After all, the purpose of having GIRs in the first place is to ensure a common background for students who might otherwise not be incentivized to step out of their comfort zone.
We understand that the committee wanted to preserve the total number of GIR units to avoid reducing the amount of time students have for coursework in their major. This is a common concern among the student body as well: many undergraduates we talked to were opposed to an increase in the total number of GIR units because they feared this would cause a net increase in coursework. However, the committee itself discovered that the great majority of MIT graduates already take courses in computation and statistics, probability, or machine learning. Adding these onto the existing GIRs would not significantly increase students’ typical course load, and we believe that this is a valid way to update MIT’s GIRs.
Furthermore, the point of a university education is not simple skill acquisition. A university offers to its students something they cannot get from joining a coding bootcamp. There is tangible and measurable value in becoming affiliated with a range of disciplines and ways of thinking for people in all lines of work. We shall not dwell on the many merits of a broad education in the liberal arts, including the natural sciences. We would just be repeating what has already been said by myriad eloquent defenses written by scholars since the Renaissance. Could Ising models have been developed without intuition gained from the physics of magnetism? Could MIT’s own Claude Shannon have motivated his information theory without the microcanonical ensemble from thermodynamics?
Despite the unfortunate implications of the proposed changes, we have seen an enheartening level of support for the natural sciences among both the student and faculty populations at MIT. We know from firsthand experience that many students, including many who aren’t studying anything close to the natural sciences, benefited in their intellectual development from classes in these topics. We are hopeful that MIT will reconsider these changes so that students and faculty may better participate in our long tradition of far-reaching academic exploration and interdisciplinary problem-solving.
Signed,
Sidarth Erat, Serena An, Andrew Brahms, Jackson Dryg, Christopher Gilbert, Jacob Greene, Cordelia Hu, Anika Huang, Dania Hussein, Henry Jiang, Evin Liang, Calvin Macatantan, Ash M., Marvin Mao, Ricardo Marin, Ruby Mykkanen, Khari Payne, Acadia Potts, Alexa Simao, Lila Shelton, Nadia Regalado Corsino, Chloe Tan, Tiger Zhang
Sidarth Erat is a first-year undergraduate student at MIT majoring in Course 8 (Physics) and Course 18 (Mathematics).