Look, the truth is, all research univeristies, Harvard included, have some tenured profs who are just absolutely TERRIBLE teachers. They’re brilliant researchers, but they’re teaching skills are terrible. Either they’re completely incoherent in speaking, or they clearly hate teaching and are only doing it because they are obligated to, or they deliberately choose to spend no time in preparing lectures, etc.</p>
<p>Consider some of these quotes from Thomas Sowell, himself a graduate from Harvard (an extremely impressive feat as he is an African-American who got into Harvard in the days before affirmative action when the entire higher education system was still racist).</p>
<p>"For example, Time magazine summarized criticisms of top Harvard professors as “too engaged in their own research, too busy with outside consulting or just too lordly to bother with anything so trivial as an undergraduate.” …Much the same picture emerges repeatedly in the Confidential Guide published by Harvard students, where another professor of government was described as “completely disorganized” in his lectures and “inept at managing classroom discussions.” Words like “disorganized” and “rambling” appear again and again in descriptions of the lectures of particular Harvard professors in fields as disparate as music, anthropology, and women’s studies. In a course on genetics, both the professor and his teaching assistants are described as “often inadequately prepared” and in an introductory chemistry course, "lectures have bordered on the incomprehensible…“A research star who actually considers teaching worthwhile,” “one of the few professors who answers his own telephone,” “everything that Harvard is supposed to be, but usually isn’t.”</p>
<p>Important as lectures are, opportunities for interaction with professors outside the classroom-in their offices or at informal gatherings-can also be an important part of an educational experience. However, according to a distinguished accreditation panel visiting Harvard in 1987, “only the most aggressive and persistent undergraduate” is likely to have any “faculty-student interaction outside of the classroom” with senior Harvard professors. Harvard is by no means unique in this respect, nor are junior faculty members or even teaching assistants always accessible at research universities. The junior faculty and the graduate students who serve as teaching assistants at many universities have other distractions and pressures that keep them from investing great amounts of time in teaching. Their whole future and that of their families hang in the balance while they try to complete their research, so as to establish themselves in their professions. Many graduate students never get the Ph.D. degree for which they have sacrificed years of their lives. Most junior faculty members at leading research universities are let go after a few years, except for those rare individuals whose research output marks them as stars to be given tenure. In short, junior as well as senior faculty at many universities have strong incentives to give teaching a low priority. The very process by which a top university maintains its prestige and visibility in the world can undermine the education of undergraduates.</p>
<p>The teaching role of graduate students at universities is far larger than many people-especially parents and high school students-realize. Harvard has about 400 people teaching who are not faculty members but teaching assistants, teaching fellows, and the like-usually graduate students, understandably preoccupied with completing their own education. Even when called “teaching assistants,” they do much more than simply assist professors with grading exams or preparing science labs. Most of the classes in introductory calculus at Harvard are taught by teaching assistants. Many teaching assistants are foreign, and a recurring complaint in the Harvard students’ Confidential Guide is that their English is often hard to understand. As for the advisory role of these non-faculty teachers, according to the Harvard Salient (a student newspaper), “academic advising can be a sad joke, often consisting of nothing more than a harried tutor’s cursory glance at the study card. Many of us qualify as ‘phantom students’ who go through Harvard without ever meeting a full professor.”</p>
<p>Those professors who enjoy teaching more than research are likely to seek out the small liberal arts college-or have to go there after being forced out of research universities for not publishing enough. Winning the “teacher of the year” award at a research university will carry very little weight when time comes to have one’s contract renewed or to be voted on for tenure. In 1987, a Harvard professor whose credentials included such an award was notified that his contract would not be renewed. I personally know three other professors at three different institutions who were notified that their contracts would not be renewed after they had won “teacher of the year” awards. One referred to the award as “travel money.” The issue of teaching versus research has been debated innumerable times and is unlikely to be settled any time soon. What is important to someone seeking good teaching is to find out where it is most likely to be found. At a top research university, where the professor knows that “publish or perish” are his career choices, it is unrealistic to expect that most will make teaching their top priority. To some, teaching is purely incidental."</p>
<p>Nor is this criticism specific to Harvard. Sowell also talks about UCBerkeley:</p>
<p>“The great state universities have similar problems, often to an even greater extent than Harvard and other large private universities. The University of California at Berkeley is unsurpassed as a research institution, its faculty have received many Nobel Prizes, its graduate programs rank above those of Harvard in several fields, and Berkeley is often rated number one among the nation’s universities. However, none of this translates into an outstanding undergraduate education. At Berkeley, there are estimated to be more than twice as many graduate students teaching as at Harvard. In addition, Berkeley has large numbers of part-time junior faculty, who support themselves by having other jobs-and therefore other demands on their time besides teaching. Finally, the huge size of the university-more than 30,000 students-ensures that undergraduate education is impersonal, bureaucratic, and sometimes chaotic.”</p>
<p>[Sowell:</a> Choosing a College Chapter 2](<a href=“Sowell: Choosing a College Chapter 2”>Sowell: Choosing a College Chapter 2)</p>
<p>The point is that many research universities, Harvard included, have uneven teaching quality in that the profs are not particularly interested in research. That’s not to say that everything is perfect at the LAC’s. But I think in general, the profs at the LAC’s tend to care more about teaching than the profs at the research universities.</p>
<p>Heck I myself was just talking to Rakesh Khurana, professor at Harvard Business School, and he himself stated that doesn’t think the teaching of Harvard undergrads is very good and that the teaching is better at the LAC’s.