The Task Force on the Undergraduate Academic Program (TFUAP) has proposed a set of changes to the undergraduate curriculum. In Chapter 6 of The Prince, Niccolò Machiavelli offers a warning to those proposing to change established ways of doing things:

“It ought to be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things . . .”

Previous attempts to update the General Institute Requirements provide little reason to ignore this warning.

MIT is not alone in this regard. Universities have long struggled to adapt their structures of teaching and their curriculum to changing conditions of knowledge. Prior to the printing press, the role of the university was largely to store and transmit knowledge. Professors read from scarce manuscripts, often dictating or commenting as students copied by hand. More than five centuries later, even as knowledge has become broadly accessible, elements of that model persist, even as the media and scale have changed.

The time-tested benefits of this process for knowledge acquisition notwithstanding, the question we face today extends beyond what knowledge should be offered. Addressing it requires a shared understanding of how learning occurs, what it means to be educated, and what role the university should play, particularly as the conditions under which knowledge is created, accessed, and used continue to evolve.

Generations of faculty have grappled with these questions, often in response to shifts in intellectual and societal conditions. We include the thoughts of others in this issue of the FNL not as prescriptions, but as reminders that the balance between content, method, and purpose has long been subject to reconsideration.

Charles Eliot, writing in the late nineteenth century, sought to adapt the American university to the needs of an industrializing society, first at MIT and then over his long presidency at Harvard. He asserted that

“The student in a polytechnic school has a practical end constantly in view [. . .] This practical end should never be lost sight of by student or teacher in a polytechnic school, and should seldom be thought of or lauded to in a college.”

Andrew Abbott, in his welcoming address to the incoming class at the University of Chicago in 2002, offered a different perspective:

“Given who you are and where you are, there is no particular necessity for you to study anything for the next few years. [. . .] Education is not about content. [. . .] It is not something you have. It is something you are.”

At MIT, the number of units each department is authorized to control falls between the norms for liberal arts programs and for professional degree programs elsewhere. Differences in perspective within the Institute can be traced in part to a structure that accommodates both orientations within a common academic framework. Julius Stratton, MIT’s president from 1959 to 1966, in his 1963 address Liberal Education and the Usefulness of Knowledge, offered a defense of this approach. His perspective can be read as mediating between these positions, placing emphasis on teaching students how to learn and think critically while grounding that effort in specific fields of knowledge and practice.

Taken together, these perspectives reflect a common premise: each responds to a shift in the conditions under which knowledge is created, accessed, and used. The resulting tension –between content and method, between transmission and formation – remains with us and is visible throughout the Task Force’s report. We are now entering another such moment, shaped in part by the rapid emergence of artificial intelligence and broader changes in the epistemological infrastructure of knowledge.

We are grateful to the Task Force for taking on this challenging assignment and for the dedication and thoughtfulness with which they have pursued their work to date. We take no position here on specific recommendations. Rather, we have sought for this issue the opinions and perspectives of colleagues across the Institute and will continue to encourage such contributions from students, alumni, lecturers, and faculty. Our aim is to highlight issues that should remain central as the Institute considers its path forward.

Our students arrive with a wide range of backgrounds, interests, and aspirations. A meaningful measure of success lies in the difference between who each student becomes and who they would have become had they spent those years elsewhere. What is taught is one input into a broader system that shapes that outcome. Pedagogy, expectations, support structures, and the broader campus environment all play essential roles, as does the sharing of responsibility for learning between faculty and students.

Benson Snyder, in The Hidden Curriculum, describes the set of implicit rules that students believe govern success at MIT. Central to this view is the role of grades as signals of learning. If grades are widely perceived as indicators of mastery, their informational content matters. When that signal weakens, whether through compression or inflation, it diminishes the quality of communication between educator and student.

This raises a more fundamental question: what, precisely, are we measuring? Unease with grading may reflect a deeper uncertainty about the alignment between our pedagogical aims, our expectations, and the outcomes we seek to assess. Greater transparency in grading patterns could support a more informed and collective reconsideration of how expectations are communicated and how learning is assessed, including whether traditional grading remains the most effective instrument for that purpose.

As we begin what will inevitably be a complex and multifaceted process, we should approach it as we do other difficult problems: by first seeking a shared, actionable statement of objectives and then examining alternatives with rigor and openness. The pedagogies employed in our classrooms and labs, the expectations we set, the support we provide, and the environment we create all warrant careful consideration.

In this context, defining the curriculum – what is to be taught – may prove to be the most tractable part of the problem. The more difficult challenge lies in understanding how learning occurs, how it is measured, and how the Institute can best support it in a time of profound change.

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