<p>LadyDi—I don’t know when you last checked but it must have been along time ago! Even freshman seminars at Harvard cannot be taught by non-faculty. With all due respect you have no recent experience to make broad statements regarding current student-faculty interaction at school such as HYPSM which are generally regarded as the best undergraduate colleges in the nation. You bring up anecdotes, make misleading or conclusory statements such as blurring the distinction between teaching sections and teaching a class or that undergrads don’t get access to star faculty. </p>
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<p>So, now we have moved from undergrads getting no attention from faculty “stars” to graduate student getting more attention! How would you know? You imply that star faculty only teach graduate seminars and that you need to be an upperclassman to get access to such classes. That is simply not true. Harvard is famous for its small freshmen seminars taught by renowned scholars. There are plenty of other courses for undergrads taught by the star faculty. It is more common than not for star faculty to teach both undergrad and grad classes. </p>
<p>The biggest fallacy is the claim that undergrads and grad students compete for the professor’s attention at top universities. You have good and bad teachers everywhere. A good teacher has a responsibility to all the students he teaches. If a star professor takes on teaching an undergraduate class, he will put the same effort that he puts put in his graduate classes, sometimes even more. At that level, he doesn’t have to take on a class unless he really wants to. He doesn’t need to publish to get tenure or get promoted. This is more the problem of junior faculty on the tenure track. At MIT, junior faculty teaches more grad students than undergrads, in part because they need the grad students as “slave labor” in their labs. Teaching undergrads at a place like MIT serves an additional purpose to simply imparting knowledge- recruiting future scientists and scholars. In order to “evangelize” fresh minds, you want to put your best foot forward and the ‘masters’ with decades of experience are most likely to succeed than newly minted professors.</p>