<p>Link to Summers interview is below. I found this interchange of interest for prospective Harvard College parents.</p>
<p>AP: You've said Harvard is the world's greatest research university, but is not yet recognized for providing the world's best undergraduate education. Why not?</p>
<p>Summers: I think the single most important issue is faculty-student engagement, where there is too large a fraction of our teaching that takes place in sections taught by graduate students. Too much of it takes place in large lectures, where faculty members don't know students' names. And too little of it involves the kind of active learning experience, whether it's in a laboratory, a debate in a class, or whether it's a seminar dialogue, or whether it's joint work in an archives.</p>
<p>He's right in a certain sense. But students tend to bring large classes on themselves. If 800+ want to enroll in Positive Psychology, then they cannot expect the instructor to remember their names and to be able to interact with them individually.</p>
<p>Summers' focus on undergraduate education, and his attitude that, no matter how great Harvard is, it can be improved, is a large part of what made him a great president (imo). I think his departure is a loss to the school. But in the five years he was there, he made some very tangible, very significant improvements, including increasing the number of faculty and greatly expanding the freshman seminar program - which gives every freshman who so chooses the ability to take seminar classes (no more than 12 students) taught by senior professors. Summers himself taught a freshman seminar every year. I hope - and expect - that these initiatives will continue despite Summers' resignation.</p>
<p>It's somewhat inevitable that, in a big school, introductory courses will have large enrollments. It's one of the tradeoffs between a university and a LAC - universities have a breadth and depth of resources that a LAC can't match, while LACs have an intimacy that universities can't match. That said, my son found it very easy, even as a freshman, to have individual discussions with professors at Harvard - by taking advantage of office hours, receptions and other events. His intro economics course had an enrollment of over 800, yet he had several discussions with the head professor, Greg Mankiw, whom he found accessible and interested in talking to students. (And, of course, the flip side of the tradeoff is that the professors are people like Mankiw - former chief economic advisor to the president and author of the most widely used economics text in the country.)</p>
<p>The upper level courses tend to be smaller. Certainly, anyone who is consciously looking to take courses with smaller enrollments can find them. But sometimes the large-enrollment courses are well worth it too.</p>