New from Harvard Extension School

[Jonathan Whatley]

In 2016 a group of Extension students organized a Degree Change Initiative. Their focus this time wasn’t the names of the school or the liberal arts titles of the degrees, but the suffix that appears on diplomas “in Extension Studies.”

The Dean of HES and the Division of Continuing Education, Hunt Lambert, spoke to a group of students who shared an excerpt to Facebook video.

“I acknowledge that the names of our degrees are inconsistent with our peers. They’re not terribly descriptive of what the programs actually are.”

“But what I have to deal with inside Harvard is respecting that names are sacred. When we chose ‘Extension Studies’ in the 1909–1910 timeframe we were the Commission on Extension Studies. You have to realize that was eight years before the federal legislation that created the agricultural extensions at the land grant universities… And so they took our name…”

“And then when we were given our degree names, the board, Harvard Corporation as it’s called here, thought very hard. What they said is, ‘We need to be enormously careful in what we call these degrees. Because the Extension School is Harvard, but it’s not Harvard College. The Extension School is Harvard but is not Harvard Business School. The Extension School is Harvard but it’s not Harvard Medical School or Dental or Divinity or Law and go down the list. And each of those schools has unique degree names appropriate to their day. What do we call these degrees? And they made a decision to call it ‘in Extension Studies.’ And… at that time, sacredness was given to those words. And at the level of our Corporation right now, I need to respect that those words are still sacred to them. My predecessor fought for a change in those words for fifteen straight years with no success. And so I have to first go back to the Corporation and say, ‘Why are those words sacred to you? What would it be?’ And we’re working through that. But it’s gonna take time…”


“I’m starting to turn my question around about that and say, maybe we should make ‘in Extension Studies’ mean something. What we can control is to say, this is what it means. It means we extended Harvard to these people. It’s not a substitute. It’s not a replacement. It’s Harvard, but for a different student.

”


“And so we’re gonna look at how we go about changing the names of the degrees, but I’ve also decided we need to look at ‘how do we bring real brand meaning to what our degrees are called?’ Because these words may be sacred at Harvard. And maybe we have to honor those words and don’t get to change the names. In which case it’s incumbent on us in the digital world to bring clearer meaning to what those words mean for the rest of the world.”

“So that’s where I am on the name change.”