Harvard: Research and Destroy

By Steven Menashi and Alexander Wilson | Wednesday, April 29, 1998

'What you get out of Harvard is the name,' says Harvard sophomore Ralph Hicks. 'Everyone knew that coming here, and the research that goes on is what gives Harvard its big name. The teaching may be worse because of it, but people come here to get a Harvard diploma. If research provides the name then I'm in favor of it, and so are most people here.'

Indeed, many Harvard students have found, upon arriving in Cambridge, that professors are preoccupied with research and do not much care for their students. 'I don't think that I've had any opportunity to talk with my professor this whole semester,' says freshman Elizabeth Keany.

Ostensibly the center of American academic life, Harvard University seems to have abandoned the teaching enterprise in favor of professors' individual scholarly pursuits.

Harvard has long led research institutions in the competition for high profile scholarly distinction — to the detriment, some critics claim, of undergraduate education.

A report by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 'Reinventing Undergraduate Education: A Blueprint for America's Research Universities,' concludes that 'The research universities have too often failed, and continue to fail, their undergraduate populations . . . Recruitment materials display proudly the world-famous professors, the splendid facilities and the ground-breaking research that goes on within them, but thousands of students graduate without ever seeing the world-famous professors or tasting genuine research.

'Some of their instructors are likely to be badly trained or even untrained teaching assistants who are groping their way toward a teaching technique; some others may be tenured drones who deliver set lectures from yellowed notes, making no effort to engage the bored minds of the students in front of them.'

'It's just pitiful,' complains one Harvard student, 'when you'll ask a Teaching Fellow a question about what a professor said in a lecture and he doesn't know. You think to yourself, 'is this guy serious?' The thing is, he's not just serious, but we both know there's no way I can get an answer.'

The Teaching Fellows' lack of preparation and training is increasingly prevalent at Harvard, especially in introductory courses. 'At the beginning of each semester, there is a desperate scramble for graduate students to lead sections in oversubscribed core courses with course advertisements for Teaching Fellows on departmental bulletin boards,' reads an article in the Harvard Crimson.. 'Yet these last ditch section leaders provide the only personal instruction students get in large lecture classes.'

Moreover, in the vast majority of the courses they teach, the TF's are responsible for the grading of all assignments.

Students who are unhappy with the mark they receive can appeal — first to the Teaching Fellow, then to the professor. This latter option, however, is rarely invoked. Harvard students, then, are left in the unhappy position of being both taught and graded by graduate students of varying competance, with little recourse to a higher authority.

The result of the current mentality is that Harvard students receive a weaker general education, even as the prestige associated with the diploma they receive is increasing.

'And with larger and larger numbers of their peers holding the same paper in their hands,' contends the Carnegie Foundation, 'even that credential has lost much of its potency.'

Harvard Teaching Fellow Katherine Baicker explains that while professors usually deliver lectures to the entire class, graduate students lead discussion sections, grade papers, and hold office hours.

Some classes are taught entirely by graduate students, who serve as Teaching Fellows. 'Most people teach to make money,' Baicker reports.

'The Teaching Fellows are the ones you go to for questions,' explains Harvard senior Christian Sax. 'Most of the professors don't have office hours or spend any time dealing with their students. Although some of the TFs are very intelligent, very good teachers, you certainly get the impression that as an undergrad you're not the university's top priority.'

'Tuition income from undergraduates is one of the major sources of university income, helping to support research programs and graduate education,' ' writes the Carnegie Foundation, 'but the students paying the tuition get, in all too many cases, less than their money's worth.'

Former Secretary of Education William Bennett formulated his own equation relating tuition dollars and education at America's research universities: 'x dollars buys the student one professor, 2x dollars buys them two, but 3x and 4x and 5x dollars gradually remove the professor from the student and 6x dollars may replace all the classroom professors with graduate students.'

Bennett's equation seems inapplicable to Dartmouth College. 'My own experience at Dartmouth is that very few professors here neglect their students,' says Professor Jeremy Rutter. 'The ethic of the place is that there is no one more important than an undergraduate student.'

At Dartmouth, Teaching Assistants are rare and never teach classes. As a general rule, they are used to supplement, rather than replace, the professor's instruction. Dartmouth's focus on undergraduate education earned it U.S. News and World Report's top ranking for undergraduate teaching.

For many associated with the College, Dartmouth's pedagogical commitment distinguishes it from large research universities and serves as its main attraction.

Dartmouth has, therefore, avoided the tendency of the research academy to serve as a clearinghouse for degrees.

Unique among Ivy League institutions, the College has maintained, despite the odds, a steadfast dedication to the values of liberal education.

Harvard, in contrast, gives its students a 'big name.' The Carnegie Foundation found that 'many students graduate having accumulated whatever number of courses is required, but still lacking a coherent body of knowledge or any inkling as to how one sort of information might relate to others. And all too often they graduate without knowing how to think logically, write clearly, or speak coherently. The university has given them too little that will be of real value beyond a credential that will help them get their first jobs.'

The spread of the research university ethic throughout American academe, threatens to transform college graduates into, as one recent visitor to the U.S. observed, 'a bunch of ignorant people with degrees.' To say that Harvard students fit this description would be untrue. Yet Harvard's emphasis on research rather than teaching, slavishly copied by lesser institutions, has exactly the effect described above.

And for all that Harvard students remain intelligent and well-educated, they too are being shortchanged by their university.

'The function of the university,' wrote W.E.B. DuBois in The Souls of Black Folk, 'is not simply to teach bread-winning . . . it is, above all, to be the organ of that fine adjustment between real life and the growing knowledge of life, an adjustment which forms the secret of civilization.' That has never been truer than it is today.

Harvard: Research and Destroy

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