<p>The best in engineering would opt for MIT but science is a toss up depending on the specific field. However the rest of your point is well taken</p>
<p>Sakky:</p>
<p>“Well, I don’t mean to defend the practice, but I can see Harvard shrugging their shoulders and asking what the problem is? … Hence, there really isn’t anything pushing Harvard to do better.”</p>
<p>Actually, you know this is not true. You’ve seen the mea culpa in the report issued by the Harvard Task Force on teaching last year calling for improvements in the quality of the undergrad educational experience.
<a href=“http://www.fas.harvard.edu/home/news...e_01242007.pdf[/url]”>http://www.fas.harvard.edu/home/news...e_01242007.pdf</a></p>
<p>This was well publicized at the time and appeared as a NY Times feature article.
<a href=“http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/10/ed...ll&oref=slogin[/url]”>http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/10/ed...ll&oref=slogin</a> :</p>
<p>Its well known that there are many other colleges where students are much more satisfied with their academic experience, said Paul Buttenwieser, a psychiatrist and author who is a member of the Harvard Board of Overseers, and who favors the report. </p>
<p>As Professor Skocpol put it, People at Harvard are concerned when they hear that some of our undergraduates can go through four years here and not know a faculty member well enough to get a letter of recommendation.</p>
<p>Its about the pursuit of excellence in teaching, said Professor Skocpol, the dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. We need to put our money where our mouth is."</p>
<p>The article seemed to really just talk about biology. Anyone know what the number drops were for other sciences? And I’m wondering if the drop from interest-in-freshman-year to graduating-in-the-major is really a new phenomenon, or if it’s same old, same old. And if the drop is the same size at other schools. Is this just a pre-med phenomenon? Or are potential research scientists really falling by the wayside?</p>
<p>Using new PhD’s as instructors: even with the Harvard name, still a tough sell. Science PhD’s are using postdoc years to build up their research publication records, free of the usual academic workloads of things like teaching and administrative duties. The PhD’s looking for tenure track research jobs (or tenure track jobs at large research universities) aren’t going to be helped by this.</p>
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<p>No, I’m afraid that it is true. After all, people can come up with all the task forces and reports that they want. But at the end of the day, if high school seniors continue to prefer to go to Harvard over other schools, then it doesn’t really matter: Harvard has no incentive to improve.</p>
<p>Look at it this way. Take the post office. It’s a government-enforced monopoly (i.e. people are not allowed by law to use their mailboxes to take delivery from any other shipping company like UPS or Fedex even though it is the people themselves who pay for their own mailboxes). You can complain all you want about the USPS, and numerous reports have been published regarding the problems of the USPS. But as long as people continue to use it anyway, the USPS doesn’t really care very much about those reports. Organizations tend to improve only when they have to improve. </p>
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<p>First off, I think we should realize that not only is this proposal not outrageous, more importantly, Harvard is already it. One can talk about how the proposal is a ‘tough sell’ or that newly minted PhD’s in science/engineering won’t be helped by this idea or that they won’t be able to afford to support families or whatever. But that simply flies in the face of the fact that is is already happening.</p>
<p>Want proof? Sure. How about Dr. Shreyas Mandre? He completed his PhD in mathematics from the University of British Columbia in 2006. After graduation, he took a job as a lecturer/instructor in the Harvard applied mathematics department. That’s right - he doesn’t hold a tenure-track job. He didn’t take a research post-doc. He took a lectureship. So if doing so was a hard sell, well, apparently, Mandre was apparently successfully sold.</p>
<p><a href=“http://people.seas.harvard.edu/~shreyas/cv.html[/url]”>http://people.seas.harvard.edu/~shreyas/cv.html</a> </p>
<p>Or how about Dr. David Malan? He graduated with a PhD in computer science from Harvard in 2007, and then stayed to take a lectureship position in the Harvard CS department, teaching the CS 50 intro class. Again, here is a guy who could clearly go to industry and make a very good salary. But he was apparently successfully sold on a Harvard lectureship. </p>
<p><a href=“David J. Malan”>David J. Malan;
<p>There are in fact many other lecturers at Harvard, the above are just a few for whom I managed to find the CV’s online. But the point is, Harvard can and does already hire numerous non-tenure-track lecturers. So if Harvard is able to do this already, what exactly is so outrageous about having more?</p>
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<p>No, I meant “Harvard does not have tenure track assistant professor jobs.”</p>
<p>Look it up.</p>
<p>Post doc positions and adjunct positions are light years apart in their career implications. Post docs are respected, expected, and in many areas mandatory for subsequent faculty appointments. Adjunct is one very small step from being out of academics altogether.</p>
<p>Harvard could enlarge the regular faculty to reduce the size of the introductory courses, but that would be extremely expensive. It also would take years since H would have to construct many new buildings to house all the labs these extra faculty would need. it might be something H could consider in the long run, but in the short term they need to get more introductory teaching out of the same group of faculty. Or just accept the current situation.</p>
<p>Just to put a counterpoint on this whole discussion, my PI (who is an enormously productive researcher and is exceedingly well-respected in his field) is one of the founding members of the new Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology (SCRB) department at Harvard. </p>
<p>He was discussing his plans for the new undergraduate curriculum at lab meeting a few weeks ago. He’ll be voluntarily increasing his undergraduate teaching load by quite a bit, and he’s very excited about it.</p>
<p>I don’t think that increasing the teaching load of most Harvard PIs would actually take them away from research – most are so high-profile that they don’t have much to do with their labs on a day-to-day basis anyway.</p>
<p>This isn’t about money. Harvard has, to put it mildly, plenty of money, and it could easily attract more highly qualified instructors to teach introductory classes.</p>
<p>But then most of the kids wouldn’t get to have lecture with the #1 guy in the department. When I was an undergrad, Dudley Herschbach (Nobel laureate) taught Chem 5 – the most basic introductory course for those with no prior exposure to chemistry. There would have been a mutiny if 1/5th of the interested students got to have lecture with him and 4/5ths got “instructors.” Every student in a large class already gets to have small discsussions/labs with a qualified, but less eminent, instructor – that’s what section is for. But everyone also gets to have lecture with the person considered the absolute best.</p>
<p>You can see this effect in NON-required courses. Justice, Psychology of Happiness, Sex, Ec 10 and the rest of the biggest classes at Harvard are either not required for any major, or they are only required for a fraction of the students who take them. They are huge because they are popular, and they are popular because the professors are well-loved superstars. If you broke down the Justice course into a bunch of 50-student lecture groups, only one of which was taught by Michael Sandel, most of the students would drop it.</p>
<p>“I have a suspicion that students who were A students in high school freak when they get a C or B in college”</p>
<p>Yes, they do. And the Harvard freshman class is made up of ~100% A students.</p>
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<p>But that does not mean they are sitting around with nothing to do. They are reading the literature, planning the next set of grant applications, supervising the people who actually do the work in the lab, sitting on committees… More teaching would take time away from this. Plus, this applies to the top people, who already have or are about to get tenure. The people hired as new assistant professors need to guard their time and turn out results or they will never get promoted.</p>
<p>Besides, as Hanna notes, the students want to be taught by “real” Harvard faculty, not someone who could not get a faculty job, but was hired to teach an intro course. So “qualified” in this context means “was offered and took a regular faculty job at Harvard”. It does not simply mean “has a reasonable mastery of the material in an introductory course”</p>
<p>Not only do many Harvard students see their first B’s and C’s of their lives, they for the first time experience the joy of no longer being the smartest kid in the room. Of being no where close, and confronting an assignment that they could not do in their sleep after sleeping through class. Some have been special for so long that they have a hard time adjusting to being normal.</p>
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<p>I am surprised that Harvard would allow such size. Many other privates, I imagine, would have splitted that into 2 or 3 lectures (the one I went to didn’t have anything bigger than 250, let alone 590). </p>
<p>I also think part of the reason is that Harvard students know that their degree is going to open many doors, regardless of what major it is. I suspect many of them were not so sure about engineering to begin with or they would have gone to Stanford/MIT instead. So given this, it’s no surprise to me they are readily to deflect from engineering and choose something easier instead.</p>
<p>Haha, afan, I’m definitely not implying that they’re sitting around doing nothing. 
Many of them do, of course, have more work than the average human could imagine in several lifetimes. But I think that many of them would increase their undergraduate teaching if they were asked very nicely to do so.</p>
<p>Some of these last few comments need to be challenged.</p>
<p>The gilded faculty at top schools, Nobel winners, Fields medalists, etc., obviously do not, with very, very, very rare exception, teach introductory undergraduate courses. Fortunately. It’s the last place you’d want to find most of them.</p>
<p>These are men and women that PhD candidates rightfully dream of working with, but their communication skills often sharply contrast with their research skills. Brilliant minds do not necessarily brilliant educators make.</p>
<p>From the NY Times article I quoted, apparently with a disconnected link:</p>
<p>Youd be stupid if you came to Harvard for the teaching, said Mr. Billings, who will graduate this spring and then go to Oxford as a Rhodes scholar. You go to a liberal arts college for the teaching. You come to Harvard to be around some of the greatest minds on earth.</p>
<p>“And that is pretty much how the thinking has gone here at Harvard for several decades. As one of the worlds most renowned research universities, Harvard is where academic superstars are continually expected to revolutionize their fields of knowledge. Cutting-edge research is emphasized, and recognized with tangible rewards: tenure, money, prestige, prizes, fame.” </p>
<p><a href=“http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/10/education/10harvard.html?scp=2&sq=harvard&st=nyt[/url]”>http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/10/education/10harvard.html?scp=2&sq=harvard&st=nyt</a></p>
<p>It’s highly misleading to suggest to college applicants that Harvard’s or Berkeley’s or any school’s Nobel parking spots are in any way relevent to their experience as undergraduates. Whether considering Organic Chem, Intro Physics, or Life Sciences 1A, the best any undergrad can hope for getting started in the sciences are dedicated teachers who can communicate and who are there in front of a classroom because they want to be there. Hopefully they don’t find themselves elbow to elbow with 589 other anxious freshmen in a cavernous lecture hall. Sakky’s argument suggesting that Harvard doesn’t need to get better because it has no incentive to improve misjudges the impact an article like this in the NY Times has on Harvard’s major “shareholders,” its Alumni and students (AKA future alumni). Negative publicity carries a major sting (let’s not forget a former Harvard president’s politically incorrect published statements and ultimate departure from Cambridge). I’d even argue being the naive idealist I am that maybe, just maybe, Harvard’s administration does really care about the quality of the education it provides its undergrads and will act to fix this fixable problem.</p>
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<p>Uh, then you’re completely wrong. Assistant professor jobs at Harvard are tenure-track jobs. After all, what does it mean to be an assistant professor if you’re not on the tenure track. </p>
<p>To give you one just example, consider the CV of Greg Mankiw, former head of the CEA. He’s obviously tenured now as a full professor, and has been since 1987. But from 1985-1987 he was an Assistant Professor of Economics. </p>
<p><a href=“http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/mankiw/cv/CV_shortversion_Nov2007.pdf[/url]”>http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/mankiw/cv/CV_shortversion_Nov2007.pdf</a></p>
<p>So how exactly did Mankiw get tenure if his Assistant Professorship was not on the tenure track? Perhaps YOU ought to look up your facts.</p>
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<p>Perhaps so, but Harvard apparently has quite a few adjuncts and lecturers on the faculty. Why those people took those positions, I don’t know. But it evidently happens. </p>
<p>Hence, if Harvard can already hire some people for adjunct/lecturer positions, why is it such an outrageous notion to hire more? </p>
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<p>But, again, that happens now anyway. Who teaches the gateway intro computer science course CS 50? David Malan. Yep, the lecturer David Malan. Every Harvard student who is considering concentrating in CS has to take CS 50. Hence, they are all forced to take a class under a “lowly” lecturer as opposed to an eminent professor. </p>
<p>[Harvard</a> College’s Computer Science 50: Introduction to Computer Science I](<a href=“http://www.courses.fas.harvard.edu/~cs50/]Harvard”>http://www.courses.fas.harvard.edu/~cs50/)</p>
<p>Yet you don’t hear any rioting in Maxwell Dworkin from the Harvard CS students demanding that CS 50 be taught by an actual professor (or, if there is such rioting, it clearly isn’t doing much good). </p>
<p>Or consider just how many of the undergrad courses are taught by (as yet) relatively obscure Assistant Profs. For example, the next CS intro course in the sequence, CS 51, is taught by Assistant Professor Radhika Nagpal. She might be eventually promoted to tenure. Then again, she might not. The fact is, many (probably most) Harvard assistant professors will not be promoted to tenure. Hence, you may end up taking CS 51 under a professor who is later found to not be worthy of tenure.</p>
<p>The upshot is that plenty of Harvard classes are currently taught by relatively unprominent faculty members. So I hardly see how the proposal to bring in lecturers makes things any worse. Again, CS 50 is already taught be a lecturer. So does it really make any difference if you broke up CS 50 into several different sections, each taught by a lecturer? Either way, you’re going to end up being taught by a lecturer.</p>
<p>And besides, I think we vastly vastly overestimate the desire of students to be taught by a famous professor. I don’t think they really do. What they really want is to be taught by a good teacher, which does not necessarily mean being taught by a famous professor. Let’s face it. Many of the famous profs at any school: Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, Yale, Caltech etc. are just not very good teachers, especially of undergrads. Just because you know how to do great research doesn’t mean that you know how to teach to undergrads. </p>
<p>I remember back when I was taking college math courses by famous profs who were terrible teachers and wishing that the classes were instead being taught by my old high school math teacher. Sure, he wasn’t a famous researcher by any means. But at least he knew how to convey mathematics in a way that was not only clear, but also fun and interesting, something that these famous profs clearly did not know how to do. </p>
<p>Nor am I the only one saying so. Ben Golub and my brother, both Caltech grads, freely admit that some of the famous profs there are bad teachers One can also simply browse websites like ratemyprofessors.com and note that many famous profs at any school have mediocre teaching ratings.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>I think the likelihood of having a world famous scholar teaching your intro class depends on the college, the department, and the individual professor. Harvard has, at least in the past, liked to have some of its leading scholars teach intro courses, and the professors liked it as well. This seems to serve several purposes:</p>
<p>This is used as marketing for the department to attract prospective concentrators. The faculty knows the intellectual firepower of the undergrads and they are always looking to bring in people who are potential stars. Putting the faculty stars out there for students to see helps in this process. From the faculty point of view a future “star” is someone who will go on to be a scholar in the field, not simply someone who gets an A in the course. So the “teaching skills” of the faculty member are less important than her/his ability to convey the excitement of the scholarly work to the students. Of course if they are terrible teachers then they still serve to show undergrad commitment, but at the expense of a good intro experience.</p>
<p>Some top scholars like reviewing the basics of the field with new students. It is fun for them.</p>
<p>In some fields it also gives the faculty member interaction with a large number of relatively new graduate student teaching fellows, some of whom may come to work with the professor in their later research. Teaching a big course then lets the professor get to know these prospective students. </p>
<p>Many professors write introductory textbooks, and teaching the intro course is the way to prepare a book.</p>
<p>I had several professors in introductory courses who then held, or later were awarded, Nobel prizes. Some were very good lecturers, others were not. Teaching a course is not just about how good the lectures might be. It is a complicated process that includes setting the syllabus, setting clear and appropriate prerequisites, picking texts and other reading, designing assignments and tests, supervising the large crew of graduate students, resolving questions and conflicts, and making sure that the whole enterprise runs on time. In retrospect I realized that even some of the “bad teachers” I had were actually good managers of their courses, just not very good lecturers.</p>
<p>I agree that there is no particular benefit to the student to sitting in a 500 person lecture from a Nobelist vs an anonymous assistant professor. However, depending on the college, there is a good chance that it might happen.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Harvard has made a choice to have large introductory courses in popular fields, then use the professor time saved to offer a huge number and variety of smaller advanced courses on a wide variety of topics. Many of these are aimed at both undergrads and graduate students and I believe it is common for undergrads to take some such courses in their majors. </p>
<p>The alternative would be to divert more faculty resources to the intro courses, but reduce the richness of the advanced course offerings. From the department viewpoint this looks like a bad trade-off. Many of the students in the intro courses will never take another course in your department, so why impoverish the offerings to your majors and grad students for the benefit of those you will not see again?</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>wbwa: There are several introductory courses (including the ones that you mention) that I know of that have famous faculty teaching them. Some not yet Nobel prize winners but are on the path and have been identified by the general scientific community as leading lights.</p>
<p>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.</p>
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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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<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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<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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<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>
<p>Sakky, Harvard is not High School. (could not resist, since you mentioned HS twice! )</p>
<p>And I would not agree that the real question is handling it “well”, for several reasons. One is that there is no agreement regard what is the best approach to teaching science. What works best for most may not work best for all. So maybe the question should be “Are lectures good enough?” to which the answer seems to be yes. Another issue is resource allocation. To the degree that more “resources” are invested in teaching these former large lecture courses, there will be fewer “resources” to invest in other activities. In other words, the issue is a resource allocation and optimization issue.</p>
<p>I would venture to say that large lectures are the optimal use of resources, whether those resources are faculty time, money to hire adjuncts to teach et. cetera.</p>
<p>Your last paragraph is really about learning styles, and that is a topic far broader than what we speak of here. But I think it fair to say that a student who understands oneself, and 18 year olds should have some understanding, should know enough to decide whether the teaching style of a particular university’s course of study of interest to the student matches the student’s learning style. In other words, if the kid can’t learn in lecture settings (for which size is not the issue, BTW), then that kid should look for schools that don’t use lectures. (maybe St Johns?)</p>
<p>“If a particular person is not suited for the Harvard style of education, then Harvard should never admit him.”</p>
<p>I agree with newmassdad – it’s ultimately up to the student to figure out which school is right for him. The school’s job is to be as up front as possible about what it offers so that the student can make an informed decision. Harvard doesn’t do a perfect job at that, but the existence of big lecture classes is no secret. Plus, every applicant gets one-on-one time with an alum to ask questions.</p>
<p>adjunct= part time </p>
<p>A job for people who are working elsewhere, and do this for a small portion of their working effort. Many are in industry (if in engineering), or private firms (accounting and law schools use adjuncts to teach some of the more pragmatic parts of the job from people who do it all day). In the humanities you get the phenomenon of people who have PhD’s, would really like faculty jobs, but cannot get them, so they support themselves with odd jobs, and cobble together as many adjunct appointments as they can find. This is quite exploitative on the part of the college. The pay is terrible for someone who actually relies on this for their income. This is pure piecework teaching for hire.</p>
<p>lecturer= full time job. Expect that this will be the primary employment obligation for the individual. Since they are full time, they are engaged in the range of activities of faculty members. They are hired to teach, but are assumed to be scholars. Typically does not lead to tenured position, but not prohibited.</p>
<p>Although lecturers are not getting rich, they are paid much more than adjuncts. They are people who might well get a regular faculty job at Harvard or elsewhere, unlike adjuncts.</p>
<p>Completely different. Not just a different title, a different job.</p>
<p>Hiring more lecturers would still create problems. Students expect to be taught by Harvard faculty, and lecturers are somewhat less. Lose the advertising value of trotting out your big names for the prospective majors. Students also use these courses to get to know a professor or two as they sort out their plans. Since they are marginal in the academic world, lecturers cannot help as much as regular faculty.</p>
<p>Again, there is more going on than learning some principles of intro chemistry.</p>
<p>Sure, one could say “large classes are part of the deal. Don’t like it? Don’t go to Harvard”. The point of the article is that Harvard is concerned about attrition in the sciences and identifies class size as a potential cause. The question is whether the solution of making the intro classes smaller is worth the price.</p>