Inside Harvard Baseball III
Matthew Yglesias comes out foursquare in favor of the dancing-juggling-bear theory of the role of senior faculty in higher education. He believes he had enough contact with senior faculty while a Harvard undergraduate--indeed, any more senior faculty contact would have materially harmed his education:
Inside Baseball II | TPMCafe: Six or seven out of my eight Core courses were taught by senior faculty... in... philosophy... senior people [were] teaching the introduction to modern philosophy... deductive logic... other things. I took a seminar with the late Robert Nozick, a couple classes on the philosophy of mind with Ned Block, a little political theory with Tim Scanlon, the history of modern moral philosophy with Christine Korsgaard, etc.... So I'm by no means sure that this trend [toward withdrawal of the senior faculty from the teaching line] is real, though obviously specific cases are bound to differ. The word on the street was always that smaller departments, like philosophy, were better about this stuff than big ones like economics and government.... That, however, doesn't seem like much of an argument for preventing the more popular majors from taking on all customers.
On top of all that... a good stretch of time I found myself substantially ignoring my coursework to edit the Independent and to launch my blog. Those seem to me, in retrospect, to have been good uses of my time and to have worked out well enough in the end for me. I was glad to go to the sort of place where it was considered more-or-less normal to dedicate a lot of time to non-academic projects like that.
My understanding was that Summers thought this was bad and students should be doing more homework and getting worse grades or whatever...
I am highly confident that by-and-large the withdrawal of the senior faculty from the Harvard teaching line is real. But I have no hard numbers. (Indeed, part of the reason I am confident is an exchange I had with someone in the Core Curriculum office back when I was Head Tutor of Economics: they refused to tell me how many Core-teaching professors had downgraded their Core courses from three hours to two hours of lecture a week. Then there was the senior professor who stood up in the FAS faculty meeting to complain about the work of teaching in the Core: it had proven so burdensome that they had restricted their graduate seminar to the Core course's section leaders, and used the graduate seminar as a teaching-staff meeting for the undergraduate course.)
As Harvard Law School Professor William Stuntz writes:
http://www.tnr.com/docprint.mhtml?i=w060227&s=stuntz022706 Three key American enterprises have seen costs rise much faster than inflation over the past generation... housing, health care, and higher education. Houses have grown bigger and better.... Doctors do things they could not imagine a generation ago. Costs may have risen faster than quality, but there is no doubt that quality has risen... substantially.
Higher education is similar--on the cost side. Benefit is another story. There is little reason to believe that undergrads and graduate students are better educated today than a generation ago.... Teaching loads of senior professors have declined; probably teaching quality has declined with it.
The culture of research universities has grown ever more contemptuous of students, especially undergraduates, who are seen as an interruption of one's real work rather than the reason for the enterprise. Which means that, year by year, students and their parents pay more for less. That isn't a sustainable business plan.
If undergraduate education is too often an afterthought, graduate education is too often a con game. A sizeable percentage of PhDs will never get tenure-track teaching jobs, which are the only jobs for which their education trains them. Since no jobs await them, they hang around longer getting their degrees, all the while teaching classes and doing research for their academic sponsors.
It's a great deal--for the sponsors. For the grad students, it's akin to buying a daily lottery ticket as a retirement plan....
But Matthew Yglesias asks an important and profound question. The first Moral Reasoning--political and moral philosophy--course listed in the Harvard catalog says that the lecturing senior faculty member, Harvey Mansfield, spends two hours a week in the classroom lecturing on Plato, Hobbes, Tocqueville: Tu Th 10. Back in 1979 I took political and moral philosophy--Government 106b--from the truly superb Michael Walzer, who lectured for three hours a week and spent a fourth in-classroom hour teaching one of the course's sections.
But was this double commitment of Walzer to the course a good thing?
Late last summer the Fifteen-Year-Old tried to work his way through Walzer's classicJust and Unjust Wars. He did not have an easy time of it. But I could see his mind visibly expanding as he would read Walzer's chapters and then sit for extended periods of time, interrupted by his asking himself (and me) questions about whether the idea of jus in bello truly does make any sense at all.
There's some chance that Walzer did not write something else as good as Just and Unjust Wars because he was spending four rather than two classroom hours a week teaching my Government 106b class. There's some chance that Robert Nozick would have written something else as great as his article on Newcomb's Problem in the time he actually spent teaching Matthew Yglesias's seminar.
The conventional view--the view I hold--is that withdrawal from the teaching line increases the quantity and decreases the quality of your scholarship. As I remember a conversation between two sixty-year-olds I heard in 1980, "If we stopped teaching we'd be intellectually dead in three years." But that is something to be demonstrated--and I don't think it has been.
The opposed view--the Matthew Yglesias view--is what I think of as the Harry Lewis view: that the senior faculty should teach only as long as they are particularly and extraordinarily interesting, and that the key to a good university is not getting full professors into the classroom but rather making the campus an interesting place.
This means lots of great lectures and lots of interesting seminars. But it also means a weekly newspaper that young, ambitious people can run; lots of theatricals; celebrity and powerful outsiders brought in for an evening; and so forth. That the Brattle Theatre showed "Casablanca" to excess seems to have been as important a part of Harvard undergraduate education in the 1950s as Sam Beers's Soc Sci 2: Western Thought and Institutions.
Probably smaller departments DO offer a lot more cases of senior faculty teaching undergrads in smaller classes, but I'd guess that even this doesn't get the issue precisely.
The real issue is the ratio of concentrators (or majors) to faculty. Often, and philosophy at Harvard is surely a case, a good number of faculty are required to teach basic courses to all, or a large segment of, the undergraduate population. But there may be relatively few majors.
THAT is when you'd expect to get a lot of instruction on a small scale from senior faculty.
February 27, 2006 1:43 PM | Reply | Permalink
Brad DeLong here offers a more ruminating piece than his earlier intervention. Still, I feel that he’s confusing way too many issues.
Here are my questions for DeLong. Some are about Harvard. But in the end I’d actually like to broaden the discussion to talk about ways undergraduate education can be improved at all universities, and specifically at public institutions.
If Prof .DeLong can jump in with answers to some of these questions it would certainly help me at least make sense of what his argument is.
*How exactly has the withdrawal of senior faculty from undergraduate education manifested itself? In DeLong’s first post the answer was (inaccurately, I think) because professors at Harvard were teaching fewer courses per semester. In this new post, DeLong suggest a new measurement: the number of hours spent lecturing per week.
*Is the undergraduate experience enhanced by increasing the teaching load (i.e., the number of classes a professor has to teach per semester)? If the teaching lode at Harvard is increased to 3/3 or 4/4 or 5/4 – as it is at many other under-funded schools, public and private – would the quality of undergraduate education increase?
*Is increasing the numbers of hours a professor lectures the most efficient way to maximize the quality of an undergraduate education?
*Would improving student to faculty ratios improve the quality of education?
*Would relying more on tenure-track and tenured professors, and less on underpaid, overworked adjunct instructors, improve the educational experience?
*Should Universities offer a wide array of electives and focus on interdisciplinary approaches to learning? Or should requirements for individual majors (“concentrations” in Harvard-speak) be strengthened?
*How serious of a problem is grade inflation? Are we doing too poor a job of setting high standards for undergraduates?
*Are small colleges superior to large research universities in terms of education? Should Harvard’s goal be to replicate at a large university the educational feel of a small college?
These are just some of the questions that come to mind.
Brad DeLong believes undergraduate education at Harvard is on the decline from some unspecified point in the past. He may be right. But the examples he cites don’t prove his case.
Outside of the Ivy League, public university professors are increasingly being squeezed. For less pay and benefits and poorer resources they are increasingly expected to have the same production schedule as their Ivy League counterparts and are simultaneously being pressed to increase their teaching load.
Ironically, all the ills that DeLong imagines for Harvard are really problems that bedevil our increasingly under-funded public university system. It’s there that there is a growing division between a narrow stratum of elite professors who have manageable teaching loads and can carry on their research and publication schedule, while an increasing pool of exploited adjuncts are overworked, underpaid, given no benefits, and provided with no structure to support their research in such a way that would permit them to move up the academic ladder. It is there that graduate programs expand beyond the capacity of the market to absorb so many new PhDs for no other purpose than to create a surplus of cheap academic labor.
And ironically, DeLong’s misguided rant against Harvard professors only serves to reinforce the negative stereotype against Professors everywhere, which in turn further weakens support for real reforms that would both improve research and education for undergraduates in public schools, which is still where the majority of our knowledge is produced and where the majority of our students are trained.
The Cranky Historian
February 27, 2006 2:23 PM | Reply | Permalink
No one cares.
February 27, 2006 4:18 PM | Reply | Permalink
Just to offer an outside perspective. The Oxbridge system in the UK strikes me as nearly the opposite of the U.S. system.
Undergraduate education at Oxford and Cambridge is still dominated by the tutorial system which gives undergraduates unmediated and frequent contact with senior fellows who personally direct students' studies and provide regular feedback on work.
Graduate students at Oxbridge, on the other hand, are largely left to fend for themselves with little contact with their faculty supervisors or other senior fellows.
As in the U.S., senior faculty face unrealistic expectations for research and production, but it is graduate, rather than undergraduate, teaching that gets squeezed as a result.
Voteless In DC
February 27, 2006 5:53 PM | Reply | Permalink
this thread makes me wonder if anyone here was ever a student at harvard.
i was, from the fall of 1965 - to the spring of 1969.
as an undergrad, in retrospect, i regret that i failed to take as much as the full professors were willing to give.
my freshman year, i took music 1 from woody. completely accessible. as a non-musician, i had no difficulties in making appts to gain his help. he was gracious and caring.
i took george wald's nat sci course that year. he won the nobel that year. a prince of an individual. totally available to us. the course was not recommended, i met with prof wald to request admission to the course.
oddly enough, i never found the tenured full profs unwilling to deal with undergrads.
the laziest bastids, the most unwilling to deal, were the tutors and the teaching fellows.
many a time i had to refuse to take a lower level NO and go upstairs. and i never found a dept head, generally an emeritus, who denied me the audience or who refused to consider my petition. i have very funny stories. one involves eliot perkins, who overrode all of the underlings in approving my senior thesis topic.
also, in retrospect, is the prof i wish that i had known better. he was the master of my house, winthrop house. bruce chalmers. a canadian from the university of toronto.
he was a master of metallurgy.
yet, he never introduced us to his science. instead, he did something unique at harvard at the time, he instigated his own subset of the college. and it had nothing to do with metallurgy, or the sciences. he broght us festivals of the arts. the two i remember most was the month long residence of peter ustinov, the two-week visit of john cage. i was the page turner for his recital. what a gas.
and both ustinov and cage were totally accessible to the winthrop hoi polloe.
under chalmers, winthrop was also the meeting spot for the alliance francaise.
in all the time that i knew him, as an undergrad, i don't recall him ever discussing his "science".
there was a mistake.
i took a gened course from stanley hoffman. no tf graded my final. stanley read it and signed off on it.
my senior thesis was read by ernie may and h s hughes. only a magna.
i have/had no complaints with harvard in my era. that was the era when harvard functioned as in loco parentis.
sometime after my graduation, that seems to have changed. my brother, who should have been the class of 1974, was in the wave of undergrads where in loco parentis was abandoned.
and there was this dean that i will never exonerate for his belief in the termination of that concept. archie epps.
i trust you are still enflamed in hell, archie.
it almost makes me wonder if the tavistock institute began rewriting harvard policies.
perhaps, in a later diatribe, i shall describe for you how the kennedy school created enron.
yes, somehow it all changed after 1969.
February 27, 2006 7:00 PM | Reply | Permalink
Brad, you are still missing the point. Harvard is a caricature of a real college, where its caricature professors run around more than satisfied with themselves getting paid caricature salaries from its caricature endowment funded by its caricature alumni who are chricaturely selfsatisfied about being caricaturely better than everyone else.
In fact, they just pay well to get connected to the best of all networks. It is who you know, and in the US, knowing Harvard graduates pays well.
Real professors actually teach, they don't benefit from students who all arrive able to learn by osmosis. Real professors have to fight for grants, they don't have all the right connections from all the right people to have a presumption that they will be funded. Real professors have to balance competing work, they don't start off with 2/2 loads that are reduced in the first couple of years. Real professors have seen salaries decline for 30 years, and now wonder why they earn less than many high school teachers.
Real students have to study, they didn't necessarily get the best possible education in high school. Real students have to learn on their own, they cannot afford tutors and special aids. Real students have to learn skills, they cannot count on connections and family to produce a direct movement into a desirable job.
Harvard is irrlevant. It is a gingerbread school. Real students have to go to cinderblock schools.
If its good for me it must be Good 4 A Merica
February 27, 2006 7:34 PM | Reply | Permalink
after graduating from harvard, i did a stint in the usmc
and then returned to pursue graduate work. at ohio state and the university of denver.
boy, did those schools make me miss harvard. imagine, graduate divisions with more bullshit rules than one could ever imagine. no opportunity for seeking the end of a lower level NO.
sorry, but intellectually, harvard was a paradise. at least in the era of 1965-1969.
and anyone who disputes that wasn't there, then. in any capacity.
February 27, 2006 8:36 PM | Reply | Permalink
*Is the undergraduate experience enhanced by increasing the teaching load (i.e., the number of classes a professor has to teach per semester)? If the teaching lode at Harvard is increased to 3/3 or 4/4 or 5/4 – as it is at many other under-funded schools, public and private – would the quality of undergraduate education increase?
Of course not. For one thing, it's to a student's advantage to have a teacher who can keep up with scholarship on what s'he is teaching and who has time to develop her/his thoughts in essay form. For another, except in disciplines where scantron tests fully assess student learning, you're better off aving someone who can give alert time to responding to papers and projects. For a third, too many of thestudents are also squeezed inthose schools, holding down 30-40 hour a week jobs while trying to carry a full load.
*Is increasing the numbers of hours a professor lectures the most efficient way to maximize the quality of an undergraduate education?
I'd prefer replacing adjuncts with full-timers who have access to resources, commitment to the institution, and time to meet with students. By and large, these are people who love to teach.
*How serious of a problem is grade inflation? Are we doing too poor a job of setting high standards for undergraduates?
I have little doubt that grade inflation exists. I thnk the average GPA in my open-admission school is around a 3.6. Is it a problem? Not so much as expectation deflation. And that's driven by student evaluations, which in many American colleges drive faculty pay raises and are embraced by administrators as part of the consumer friendly education experience.
*Are small colleges superior to large research universities in terms of education? Should Harvard’s goal be to replicate at a large university the educational feel of a small college?
Can small colleges match the labs and faculties of research universities' science departments?
February 28, 2006 1:40 AM | Reply | Permalink
Brad,
Can we have some disclosure? From your own site it looks like you're teaching 2-0-1 this year on a quarter system, two graduate courses and an upper-division undergraduate course. You were also working in the Treasury in DC while an Associate Prof. at Cal. I don't begrudge you any of it, but how does these commitments square with your new mission.
From your online cv, it looks like you and Summers co-authored quite a few articles.
February 28, 2006 1:45 AM | Reply | Permalink
Couple of comments. First, when I was there, getting access to professors at Harvard wasn't particularly difficult. They all had office hours. But, more to the point, the graduate school catalogue was open to underclassmen. If you wanted to be in a smaller lecture course with a more engaged faculty member, you took a grad school course. You were also free to audit such courses, so if you wanted to hear Feldstein lecture on macro theory in a more intimate setting and in a more engaged way, you just had to go to his graduate course.
In Brad's descriptions of teaching load, there's a notion implicit of students as passive consumers, rather than actively involved in their education. It's certainly the case that Harvard could be a bad place for students who intend to be passive consumers of educational resources. You also have to keep in mind the enormous availability of resources at a place like Harvard--but you do have to seek them out. I can't think of many other programs where I would have ended up spending a paid year on a research project in Africa as an undergraduate.
Second, I'd argue this is true of any large, research-oriented university program. I went to grad school at Minnesota, and I did not get the impression undergrads had any more significant contact with professors than students at Harvard did. There was also a decided element of, for lack of a better word, vocational rather than academic training--courses in how to use a computerized spreadsheet, for example--that I was surprised to find in a college catalog.
In a research-oriented university there are necessarily going to be professors who are going to be bad in the classroom. I was much better off with Nancy Stokey leading my junior year tutorial, even though she was a graduate student, than my counterpart at Minnesota would have been with tenured professor Ed Prescott, even though the two of them eventually collaborated on some pretty esoteric work.
It happens that Summers was particularly active in recruiting and mentoring undergraduates within his own research programs. (I, for a little while, was among those). I don't know to what degree that tendency influenced his views that there should be more faculty/undergrad contact, but I think he viewed it as a two-way street.
February 28, 2006 4:55 AM | Reply | Permalink
Obviously some people do. But there's no need for you to hang around.
February 28, 2006 7:37 AM | Reply | Permalink
If you want the best possible undergraduate education then you should go to the best possible small liberal arts college. They are the ones who regard undergrad education as their first and most important mission.
It may be fun to be lectured by famous guys so you can drop names but as a grad student at Harvard there was no doubt that profs had a lot less time (way way less) for undergrads than was the case at my small college. There are some students who will do fine under such circumstances but I suspect they would have done fine anywhere.
Further evidence for the superiority of a small college undergrad education is the fact that a disproportionate number of professors at those large research universities are alums of those small colleges.
Bottom line - You are best off if you go to an institution that has its comparative advantage in whatever it is you are looking for. As an undergrad that would be undergrad education. As a grad student it would be research.
Steve Kyle
March 1, 2006 10:00 AM | Reply | Permalink