<p>I expect that he would not be given tenure at Brown nowadays for exactly the same reason. A young scholar was not given tenure at a top LAC because she'd not published enough, although she got rave reviews from her students. She is now teaching at a regional college where publications are truly not expected of the faculty.</p>
<p>I'll second Ivyalum's comments regarding encouraging our kids to seek out professors during office hours. Harvard is still an amazing place partly because the hard-driving accepted students continue to be hard-driving and actively, if not ruthlessly, seek out professors during office hours.</p>
<p>Many, many kids at other schools, however, hesitate to do this because 1) it's not required, 2) you can usually get your questions answered by the TAs, and 3) it can seem formidable to less-than-outgoing or less-driven kids to approach someone to whom you are a complete stranger.</p>
<p>In small classes (whether at LACs or Universities), profs can break the ice, know your name, have discussions with you DURING class, which makes seeking them out AFTER class much easier and more rewarding. My 2cents.</p>
<p>Sooz--I want to respond to your comment that "some get in" to the upper Brown workshops. Because the lower levels are trained by TAs they end up getting inadequate training ...and so, their ascention to the upper levels often is a matter of sheer original talent or else subjective taste. But that is NOT what is supposed to happen. Writing is also a craft, and sometimes those who seem not that good, with a bit of the right training, turn out to be the BEST. That early training is essential --and essential, as well, in sorting out the essence of the talent. I do not agree that this is the best way to train writers, even with the benefit of complete inclusion. It isn't REALLY complete inclusion. My own kid now is in those upper classes. Yet you end up having a two-tiered writing program and even many literary arts majors are NEVER accepted into an advanced class. Those at the lower levels may never learn what they need --if they are serious about this. Speaking personally, I do not agree that this is really the way to train serious writers. Because I think training is so important, I would put money down that higher numbers of more skilled writers are coming out of Sarah Lawrence.</p>
<p>cloverdale7:</p>
<p>What would YOU do? Brown probably can't afford to hire enough successful authors (who are interested in teaching, and who won't sexually harass the students) to teach as many courses/sections as it wants to offer. If it does what everyone else does -- hire a limited roster of tallent, offer a few courses, restrict admission to them -- you don't have such a different result. Kids get a coveted slot in the prestige-teacher seminar based on natural talent, subjective taste, or luck, and everyone else is left out in the cold. A very small number of kids, probably those with a lot of natural talent going in, would get to take three or four seminars, and benefit a lot from them, another group would get one, and benefit some, and everyone else would get none and no benefit at all.</p>
<p>Doing it Brown's way makes some level of basic training -- even if it's hit-or-miss -- available to everyone who wants it, and some of them WILL develop to the point where they can get into and benefit from upper-level classes. Plus, it has huge benefits for the MFA program -- giving the students teaching experience, helping them finance their degree -- which means attracting better students, which means improving the quality of the introductory courses they teach. And having more, better MFA students leads to having more, better prestige authors in the faculty slots. So, once Brown has decided to have an un-rationed undergraduate writing program, the structure it is using follows pretty logically. (Or maybe it decided first to have a large MFA program, unlike most of its peers, and the rest followed from that. I don't know whether the chicken or the egg came first.)</p>
<p>Anyway, my point it that it's easy to take shots at Brown's program -- and I have done that, too -- but a little harder to propose a concrete, philosophically equivalent alternative.</p>
<p>Hope this works with chart.</p>
<p>All Ivies are not equal in size.</p>
<p>School Under Graduate Ratio Under:Grad Urban/Rural
Brown 6,010 1,633 3.68: 1.0 U
Columbia 7,318 17,010 1.00: 0.43 U+
Cornell 13,562 7,076 1.00:2.0 R/U-
Dartmouth 4,085 1,600 2.55: 1.0 R
Harvard 6,715 12,424 0.54:1.0 U
Penn 9,730 11,821 1.0: 0.823 U
Princeton 4,923 2,290 2.14:1.0 Suburban
Yale 5,333 6,074 1.0:.0.88 U-</p>
<p>cloverdale...writing IS a craft, like you say. And in certain college majors that are a craft, you have to pass certain evaluative criteria to move ahead in the program. Some of it is subjective in nature. The fact that some are unable to move onto the higher levels of the major, yet some do, is rather common in a major that is a craft that has some form of evaluative nature to move onto classes that are by selection. I have a child (not at Brown) in a major that is also a "craft", though in her degree program, the selection process to get into the major (which is also a subjective selection) happens before being admitted. But at many schools that offer her major, that selection process continues throughout the program at evaluative benchmarks. Who moves on and who doesn't....it is hard to pinpoint that based on the training they received in the earlier years of the program...because everyone received the same training. Some entered with more talent than another. Some developed their talent in the lower years of the program. I don't know that I would blame the program for the kids who don't advance into the upper levels. However, a student could CHOOSE to go to a school that once you are admitted, you are able to advance through the major without any "cuts" or any "selection" to get to the upper levels (other than if you are flunking out, etc.). It is true that at some schools, your son could be in a program where as long as he is doing the work, he can proceed up the course levels without having to be "admitted" to them. I guess that Brown's Literary Arts program requires selection into its upper levels. </p>
<p>On a different note, I agree with Ivyalum that student initiative is part of the professor/student relationship. I know that my kids have relationships with faculty but they do not hesitate to make that kind of contact.</p>
<p>I think JHS has described very well some of the issues concerning faculty vs. TF taught courses. If you want a small program (small classes) taught by faculty, you'll need to be restrictive unless you are willing to hire a large number of top names in the same fields. Harvard has to world famous Shakespeare experts, but how many could hire even one?</p>
<p>If you want to open programs (or classes) to all interested students, chances are that the program (of classes) will have to put caps on the number of students allowed in. Great for those in the classes or programs, not so great for those outside looking in enviously.
I am not addressing the issue of TF quality here. It varies, as does the quality of profs' teaching.
I once took a class taught by a prof who'd been very famous for his contribution to his field. The class was part of the Gen Ed requirement, so it was large. The prof, alas, had been in a car accident several years earlier. His department did not wish to fire him, (I don't even know whether it would have had cause) but his brain had been affected. The course was rescued from being a total disaster by the TAs. They were hired by the Department to basically hold his hand and co-teach the course.</p>
<p>Re: Post #145</p>
<p>The numbers don't tell the whole picture - Harvard has at least three grad programs (Business, Law and Medical School) that are completely independent of the undergrad programs. As far as I know the teachers almost none of the their professors teach undergrads and the students don't TA courses. There may still be a law student who lives in the house to mentor future lawyers and the master of one of the houses in my day was a law school professor. That said it was interesting how different the grad student/undergrad ratios were.</p>
<p>Agreeing with mathmom.</p>
<p>I looked at the Penn numbers. There are only 2,400 graduate students in Arts and Sciences, vs. probably 6,000 undergraduates (not counting the arts-and-sciences classes Wharton undergrads take). I don't think the number of students in the vet school, the law school, the medical school, or the social work school really impacts the undergraduate educational experience. </p>
<p>On an apples-to-apples basis, Penn, Yale, and Princeton all have about the same ratio of undergraduates to PhD-candidate grad students in arts and sciences: there are somewhat more than 2 undergraduates for every grad student. Dartmouth only has 600 true academic grad students, so its ratio is much higher, more like 6.7:1.</p>
<p>"Brown probably can't afford to hire enough successful authors (who are interested in teaching, and who won't sexually harass the students) to teach as many courses/sections as it wants to offer."</p>
<p>Why not? Bard does (with a small fraction of the endowment). </p>
<p>I also think the way many prestige universities do it is "upside down". The time when doors are being opened in students' minds is when they first get there - the very best teachers should be reserved for those students who need the most scaffolding. </p>
<p>Having been a TA in the Chicago core, I can attest that I wasn't among them.</p>
<p>Adding to posts 148 & 149:</p>
<p>According to the Harvard Fact Book, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS) has a total of 3,750 students of which 568 are pursuing a Ph.D. in medical sciences. It's not clear whether these are involved in undergraduate teaching. While there may be a very occasional law school student who is hired as a TA, 99.99% of TFs are drawn from among the 3,750 (possibly minus 568). This would bring the ratio of undergraduates to graduates to about 2:1.</p>
<p>mini -- </p>
<p>I don't know enough about the Bard program to evaluate that. Compared to Brown, Bard has a more charismatic, arts-focused president, it's closer to NYC, it has many fewer students, and they have much better weed. I don't know what the writing-training structure is there, or how it really works. It's hard to believe Bard offers the dozens of writing seminars Brown does, because I've never seen anyplace that does. (My niece who just graduated from Western Washington with a BA in creative writing started out at Bard and disliked it. But I never heard her mention the writing program there.)</p>
<p>By the way, what you said about teaching beginning students was a big issue at Harvard Law School 20 years or so ago. There were huge battles over the first-year curriculum, and who got to teach what. The faculty thought that was their only chance actually to affect anyone's thinking, and anything they cared about had better be included in the first year.</p>
<p>I peeked at the Bard catalogue. (a) The faculty is impressive, but really no more so than any other decent creative writing faculty, including Brown's. There are a few big names, a few young people, a few old people, and a bunch of cross-appointments and famous visitors. (b) Getting into any writing workshop requires an application. "Several" are offered every semester, but it's unclear how many, and how many of the faculty are teaching in any particular semester. Certainly not all of them.</p>
<p>It's a nice program with good people, but it looks like everyone else's program. I don't necessarily get to have John Ashbery critique the poems I wrote about my high school girlfriend when she dumped me.</p>
<p>Re: TAs vs. faculty.</p>
<p>Are assistant professors at the beginning of their careers any better than advanced graduate students? Does getting a sheepskin suddenly confer additional teaching skills? Are we comparing graduate students with profs that have been teaching for the last 20 years? Is having the most up-to-date knowledge of a particular topic less valued than long pedagogical experience?
Would Mini have been a better teacher if he'd waited to have his Ph.D. in hand before standing in front of undergraduates or would he just have known more about his dissertation topic?</p>
<p>
[quote]
I believe that the initiative of students can be even more important than the particular college they are attending.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>I think Ivyalum's post rings true. It may also be true, however, that some colleges make it easier or actively invite this initiative, and also that certain types of students find taking the initiative easier in some settings than others. As for Columbia, which has never been known as a warm and fuzzy place, my S seemed to actively avoid faculty contact until he got a little clearer about what he wanted to do. Then he reached out and got excellent response. Last summer, he worked on a problem with a math professor outside of any structured program, while at the same time meeting weekly with a computer science professor who -- taken with his enthusiasm for her field -- basically gave him her course one-on-one informally and not for credit. At the end of the summer, he met with an operations research professor whose course he enjoyed, and who spent an hour discussing graduate school vs time off, academia vs industry, and other issues my S has been grappling with. Two of these profs are senior faculty with major accomplishments in their fields (op res guy is in the National Academy of Engineering), while the third is an up and coming young assistant prof knee-deep in research. What's particularly interesting is that my S is not even a major in ANY of these departments.</p>
<p>Geez will some one make me proofread my posts? :eek: I edited that one into incoherence, I'm glad someone figured out what I was saying!</p>
<p>In response to marite's questions, I have yet another anecdote.</p>
<p>When I was in law school, the school hired a new professor out of a law firm to teach corporate law. He was monumentally unpopular his first year -- unclear, unfocused, flailing and floundering. Students were ready to lynch him; his advance class registrations were tiny. Toward the end of the year, he submitted his first article to the Law Review. It, too, was something of a mess, and of a length to rival War and Peace. If he hadn't been on our faculty, we wouldn't have touched it -- and the editors who had suffered through his class were in favor of soaking it in gasoline, setting fire to it, and tossing it into his office. But it had some really interesting ideas in it, both theoretical and practical, and dovetailed really nicely with some big-name articles we knew were going to come out in the Harvard Law Review, whose offer to publish them had been accepted over ours. (Also, it was part of the unwritten compact between the Law Review and the administration that we would bend over backwards to publish our junior faculty.)</p>
<p>There was a massive editing project, in which the article was split into two articles, one on theory and the other on one practical application of the theory. He worked closely with several editors for a number of months reorganizing and revising the piece. When it was done, two things happened: he quite quickly became an academic star, and he became a much, much better teacher. Part of that was mere experience, no doubt, but I was certain that a big part of it had been going through the process of actually organizing his thoughts in an effective way. Some of what the editors did was to force him to have a point of view, and to organize his writing around that. That carried over into his teaching -- all of a sudden, he was persuasive and focused, he had something to say, and he knew how to say it. </p>
<p>Anyway, the point is that writing and defending a thesis -- which is what this effectively was -- CAN have a positive effect on one's teaching ability.</p>
<p>(Some of my TAs didn't need to do that to be effective teachers, though.)</p>
<p>I am a freshman at Cornell and I only have ONE lecture class- Soc 101. While there are definately many students, the class is not filled to capacity (plenty of empty seats, way too many to count). My freshman writing seminar has 20 students, my spanish class has about 25 and Math has 25 (these classes are always small). So, I believe that whether the classes are overcrowded depends on your major. For example, Psych 101 is a huge CLASS 1600 students in total, however, the other Psych classes will be much smaller because people take Psych 101 for the hell of it (most taken class at Cornell). So yeah, I will say that there are lecture classes at Cornell, but not all of your classes will be lectures (usually). Also, for the huge classes, there are sections and additional sections (which give you packets and help you review the information in extremely small groups). Furthermore, yes, some classes at Cornell do have TA's teaching, some FWS have grad students as the actual teachers. However, there are also some classes where TA's teacher but professor are in the room to answer questions and to help the TA. So at Cornell, large class sizes do exsist, but certainly not in EVERY class. I went into Cornell thinking that ALL of my classes would be huge classes where teachers don't answer questions- it's not like that. Teacher's ask questions, and hell, the even ask them and are happy to talk to their students about their life's passions.</p>
<p>My largest class at Cornell is a 60-man lecture, HIST 294; CHEM 359 (Orgo) has 30, MATH 221 (Linear Algebra) has 25, MUSIC 245 (Gamelan) has 20, ENGL 127.3 (Writing Seminar) has 15. All the courses have TAs, but only one, that for MATH 221, actually does something visible (running a section). The rest just help with course management and grading. I believe the writing seminar may be taught by a junior professor, but that is it.
In contrast, most of the students in my hall are taking CHEM 207, which has more than 350, and BIO 101, so large (500) the prelim was a multiple choice test.</p>