If "Harvard undergraduates don't get the attention", who does?

Colleges and Universities A-Z Harvard University
1

<p>Are Harvard undergraduates truly at the "heart of the institution", or do they watch from the sidelines?</p>

<p>Which group seems to steal the spotlight at Harvard? Perhaps the largest group? Is it the law school guys? The med school people? The MBAs? Or some combination of people from specific Masters / PhD programs?</p>

<p>What is Harvard's "flagship"? Or is it spread around? What's the distribution on this?</p>

<p>I mean, Harvard seems to be so good at everything. Surely every school has one, two, or three "spotlight areas".</p>

2

<p>It’s simple:</p>

<p>Harvard Law School is very focused on the law students.</p>

<p>Harvard Medical School is very focused on the medical students.</p>

<p>Harvard College is very focused on the UNDERGRADUATES.</p>

3

<p>I have just heard so many times that “Harvard doesn’t focus on their undergraduates”</p>

<p>Is that just a myth spread by Princeton/Dartmouth/LAC folk?</p>

4

<p>It seems to be a myth. I’ve seen that comment made hundreds of times on CC, but never by a Harvard student or alum.</p>

5

<p>Our experience has been that most of the daunting stereotypes about Harvard - especially the one about supposed inattention to undergrads - aren’t accurate, and that undergraduate life there offers as much support as a student could hope for. </p>

<p>The stereotypes about Harvard abound - elitist, sink-or-swim, inaccessible faculty, and of course, lack of attention to undergrads (I’ve asked on CC what exactly this is supposed to mean . . . no one who’s been concerned about it has ever been able to describe for me what it might look like if they were to encounter it!). But having gone this route with two daughters - a May graduate and a rising junior - I can tell you that the stereotypes just haven’t panned out. We’ve been floored at the support, the generosity, the willingness to return e-mails and address special situations, and the incredibly supportive nature of the students towards one another. </p>

<p>My D1’s initial House Master in her residential college lived with his wife in the attached apartment and ate in the Commons with the students for 13 years, and he has a Nobel Prize. He stepped down from that role and was replaced by a young faculty member who had just been named by Time as one of the 100 most influential people in the world. The advising for freshmen is four levels deep, all the way from senior faculty down to upperclass student Peer Advising Fellows. The undergraduate college is only 6,000 students and the opportunities and resources are too numerous to describe.</p>

<p>My D1 never considered Harvard, but being a singer, decided as an afterthought to e-mail choral directors at all the Ivies to see if they’d have any interest in meeting with her if she were to visit the campus. Four never replied, two sent one or two-line responses, and the departmental secretary at Yale responded “Our faculty do not meet with prospective students.” The faculty member from Harvard responded with several pages of glowing testimony about the campus, its students, and how he might be able to assist in the admissions process if she could audition for him. And that level of response to students has been the norm as far as we can tell.</p>

<p>Harvard’s not for everyone. Yes, the dominant personality there is Type A, and since students are chosen because they’re dynamic, I think it’d be considered more condescending than nurturing there to engage in “hand-holding” students. But that environment has stretched my D2’s comfort zone, getting her more assertive in seeking out the opportunities she wants. Since going to Harvard, D1, a Government concentrator with a Latin American emphasis, has been to Peru, Argentina, China (to teach about Latin American political movements), and Brazil - mostly arranged and paid for by the university. D2 has been to Buenos Aires on a similar deal. It’s a remarkable undergraduate experience - one that leaves in the dust my own experience at a school with under 3,000 undergrads that’s supposedly renowned for its “undergraduate emphasis.”</p>

6

<p>I think it depends on your area of study - for instance in the lab based sciences most faculty have to raise money to fund labs, have successful research and publish. They rely a lot on grad students and post docs who have few other obligations like undergrads do. There are undergrads who spend time in labs and some work over the summer. However faculty must divide there time between their labs and there teaching and teaching is given a lower priority (if any) in tenure decisions.</p>

7

<p>Things may be different now from when I was there in the '80s, but that was not my experience in the sciences.</p>

<p>Except in large introdctory courses like Chem 5 and Physics 1, although labs were indeed taught by graduate teaching fellows, I knew my professors, and they knew me by name. It was in the English Department, in fact, where I had to make an effort to show up on my professors’ radar screens. I think it has a lot more to do with the size of the department–and, of course, with the temperament of each professor–than with the discipline per se.</p>

8

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<p>How about tenured professors? Is teaching still of a lower priority?</p>

9

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<p>This is true to some degree at Harvard, and it is also true at pretty much every other research university as well - the other Ivys, state universities, private schools, all of them. A prof’s research publication record always weighs heavily in tenure decisions.</p>

10

<p>The reputation for poor undergraduate teaching is one that has haunted Harvard for decades. Internally, the subject remains quite controversial:</p>

<h2>Harry Lewis, who has taught computer science at Harvard for 40 years and served as dean of Harvard College for 7 years in the 90s and early 00s wrote a damning critique of education quality at Harvard in his 2006 book “Excellence without Soul: How a Great University Forgot Education”. Here’s an excerpt from a review:</h2>

<h2>“great teaching can be viewed in academic circles as a kind of performance art, fine if you can do it but raising doubts about the teacher’s seriousness as a scholar.” Harvard… pays very little attention to a professor’s ability to conduct a good class and pays inordinate attention to his publication record. But poor teaching isn’t inevitable… “A quarter mile from Harvard Yard, the Harvard Business School puts pedagogy high on the list of institutional missions. Students who move from the College to the Business School are astonished by the improvement in teaching quality,” Lewis notes. It’s a question of priorities …"</h2>

<h2>And that is from the former DEAN of Harvard College! Harvard did an internal review of teaching quality in a 1997 review spearheaded by Theda Skocpol, a quite prominent scholar at the University. Here is a review of the finding on a website maintained by Richard Bradley, a former grad student at Harvard and the author of a prominent book on Harvard under Larry Summers:</h2>

<p>Thursday, January 25, 2007
At Harvard, a Watershed
The Task Force on Teaching and Career Development, led by GSAS dean Theda Skocpol, has released a landmark report on the quality of teaching at Harvard.</p>

<p>While praising the contributions of many professors, the report eloquently describes an academic culture in which teaching is not rewarded, but is de-valued and de-emphasized. Again and again graduate students and junior professors get the message that, if they want to get ahead at Harvard, they should blow off the teaching and focus on research.</p>

<p>(This is reflective of a larger issue at Harvard, where individual success is generally valued more than contributions to the larger community.)</p>

<p>Skocpol’s committee delineates this phenomenon with uncomfortable specificity. As best I can tell on a quick skim of the 86-page document, it does not go into issues in particular departments—hello, economics?—but the anonymous quotes it includes from people who try to teach well yet are discouraged from it are pretty damning</p>

11

<p>H and younger S got far more individual attention from profs at their LACs than I got at Harvard. However, I had an exposure to more excellent, student-run ECs and to more students with deep, passionate interests and talents. </p>

<p>To me, Harvard’s advantage is its student body and the fact that one has the freedom to run with one’s interests whatever those are. LACs’ advantage is a far stronger teaching environment.</p>

12

<p>“However faculty must divide there time between their labs and there teaching and teaching is given a lower priority (if any) in tenure decisions.”
I didn’t mean this as a critique of teaching skill but rather as a comment on availability and time pressure of faculty. I would say most do value their teaching and that would be a main reason why they choose academia over industry in the sciences - I will also say harvard faculty have a light teaching load which can help however I think my D who is at a LAC has had the opportunity to interact with faculty in smaller groups and more intimate classes earlier in her college life than students at Harvard.</p>

13

<p>I’ve taken a few science classes at Harvard, and they were all taught well. However, there is always going to be less personal attention at a major research university than there would be at an LAC.</p>

<p>To respond to a couple people’s comments, I don’t think tenured profs really slow down. If they were the type to do that, they probably wouldn’t have ended up at Harvard. Also, I think the pressure to publish is also prevalent in humanities fields in addition to the sciences. However, the difference is at least they don’t have to manage a lab, which takes a lot of time and energy.</p>

14

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Certainly not at big research universities.</p>

15

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<p>Several Harvard people said essentially the same thing. If the student body is so outstanding, in a way I believe that’s the case, then with better teaching the school can be even better.</p>

16

<p>“I’ve seen that comment made hundreds of times on CC, but never by a Harvard student or alum.”</p>

<p>How many people who have gone to Harvard for undergrad have had significant undergrad experience elsewhere, to be in a position to make an informed comparison?</p>

17

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There probably aren’t a lot of people who have gone to Harvard AND, say, Princeton for undergrad. Perhaps the occasionally transfer, but I don’t recall any mention of that in the many comments I’ve seen about Princeton being better for undergrads. So to make that informed of a comparison (which is still subjective) would be quite difficult.</p>

18

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<p>Good question. But this limitation applies to Harvard critics just as much as it does to Harvard students and alums. Those students and alums of other schools who come here to trash Harvard are equally not “in a position to make an informed comparison.”</p>

19

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Anyone with both undergraduate and graduate degrees from Harvard is qualified to make the statement that “Harvard doesn’t focus on its undergraduates.” However, people qualified to make the statement “Harvard doesn’t focus on its undergraduates as much as [some other school] does” are much rarer.</p>

20

<p>My understanding is that there used to be less of a focus on teaching, but that is certainly no longer the case (in my experience, at least). Professors practically plead with students to come to their office hours and ask questions, since they are required to hold them and don’t want to just sit around twiddling their thumbs, and all my professors knew my name, even in my largest classes (around fifty people). I have never really required more significant individual attention, so I can’t say how well the professors respond to those needs.</p>

<p>The Harvard administration seems committed to rapidly solving any problems that may arise at the College—more rapidly than you would think for something so large and bureaucratic, probably since they are compelled to maintain their reputation as the (perceived) number one school in America. Their advising system was criticized, so it was revamped. Freshmen’s lack of accessibility to helpful upperclassmen was criticized, so the very competitive Peer Advising Fellow system was introduced, paying upperclassmen a stipend to basically be available to answer freshmen’s questions. Inflated class size was criticized, but my average class size has been about fifteen people. And so on.</p>