Harvard sciences and engineering

[sakky]

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A lecturer is not an adjunct. Completely different jobs.</p>

<p>There are important distinctions between tenured and nontenured positions, lecturer, adjunct, and assistant professor. Confusion on this point is making it difficult to follow the discussion. The fact that assistant professors teach courses has nothing to do with the proposal to bring in adjuncts. The fact that Harvard uses lecturers has nothing to do with adjuncts.

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<p>I think that’s just a matter of semantics because lecturers and adjuncts at many schools are basically treated the same way. It’s just a name. But fine, have it your way. So then Harvard should hire more lecturers. Happy now? </p>

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On the other hand, someone who is not engaged in scholarly work at all, which describes most adjuncts, should not be teaching intro courses at a place like Harvard. Again, this is not just an introduction to the basic concepts of the field. It is an introduction to the scholarly life. You have to live it to teach it.

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<p>So why is the lecturer David Malan teaching the intro CS course, as opposed to an actual professor? Granted, Malan is still engaged in research, but one could reasonably ask if he were really that good, why didn’t Harvard offer him an assistant prof tenure-track job? Why are many of the intro math courses taught by preceptors as opposed to actual tenure-track professors? </p>

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The other alternative, extremely expensive and long term, would be to have a substantially larger faculty while holding student body constant. Then one could keep the teaching loads the same, cut the size of the intro courses, and retain all the advanced courses. But consider, to cut a 500 student course to ten 50 student courses, you have to use up 10 professor teaching slots. That adds up, even at Harvard.

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<p>And there is yet another alternative which is what I have been proposing - just hire more lecturers. They’re cheap. Harvard already has some. It wouldn’t cost that much to hire a bunch more (after all, they don’t get paid much). Then you would be able to split up those intro courses - which are already taught by lecturers - into smaller pieces. </p>

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Did anyone stop to think that there may be a reason for using large lectures to teach introductory science, not just at Harvard, but at most other colleges, too?</p>

<p>Did folks stop to think that learning introductory science is fundamentally different from learning something like introductory literature, or introductory sociology (or introductory sociology of science?)</p>

<p>The fact is that introductory science is greatly about learning new terms, paradigms, theories and such - material that lends itself well to large lecture formats. Frankly, there is not a lot of room for (or need for) discussion of the nuances of the definition of a ribosome or the organization of the periodic table or the beauty of thermodynamics. Not before one understands the fundamental language and principles.</p>

<p>So the reason Harvard uses large lectures is because it works for some disciplines. That some students complain about it does not tell me much about any problem. I think it says more about the student.

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<p>I can appreciate that some subjects can be handled passably by large lecture courses. </p>

<p>But the real question is whether it can be handled passably and whether it can be handled well. Again, I think back to my high school which had quite small science and math courses and where free-flowing discussion was de-rigueur. That environment fostered strong learning, even of ostensibly rote knowledge. My high school was also not exactly the greatest high school in the world (note, it wasn’t terrible, but I wouldn’t say it was the very best). </p>

<p>Your last sentence I think is quite telling. It may indeed say something about the student. But, hey, Harvard chose to admit that student. If a particular person is not suited for the Harvard style of education, then Harvard should never admit him. But now that it has, then I think that it is not unreasonable for Harvard to provide a learning environment that caters to that student, and some students don’t do well in large environments. {If Harvard doesn’t want to do that, then fine, Harvard can use statistical analysis to figure out which students are both likely to try to major in science and to do poorly in large intro science courses and simply not admit those students.}</p>