Section Size Cap Endorsed by Six More Faculty Groups, Discussed at Town Hall

Over the past week, faculty from the departments of History, Comparative Literature, History of Science, and Slavic Languages and Literatures, from the Committee on Degrees in Social Studies, and from the graduate program in American Studies endorsed the Harvard Teaching Campaign, a movement urging University administrators to adopt a 12-student cap on sections and lab groups.

The endorsements bring the number of departments and programs that have expressed support for the campaign to 15, all of which are in the humanities and social sciences.

Daniel L. Smail, interim chair of the History Department, said that the motion to endorse the section size cap passed “with great enthusiasm” at last Wednesday’s departmental meeting.

“Everyone is realistic about the fact that there are many demands upon University budgets,” Smail said. “And we are very much hoping that this issue will be put on the front burner in terms of University agenda.”

In the Department of Comparative Literature, endorsement of the campaign received unanimous support from the faculty, according to Comparative Literature professor Karen L. Thornber.

“We really do believe that getting students involved in a deep and meaningful way with the material is essential to…providing them with the sort of transformative educational experience that we want them to have,” Thornber said.

On Tuesday morning, Dean of Undergraduate Education Jay M. Harris and Dean of the College Rakesh Khurana convened a town hall meeting for concerned faculty and departments that endorsed the campaign. At least nine departments were represented at the meeting, which Crimson reporters were not permitted to attend.

According to History doctoral candidate Cristina V. Groeger ’08, who organized the campaign, the meeting was “very productive.”

At the meeting, Harris and Khurana said that budget concerns are not a major obstacle to reducing section sizes, Groeger wrote in an email.

Other issues discussed at the meeting include a more centralized mechanism to assign sections to teaching fellows and more flexibility in the number of sections that TFs can lead each semester. The deans indicated that they would like to continue to discuss these items early next spring, according to Groeger.

Thornber, who also attended the meeting, said that faculty members raised concerns about the quality of undergraduate education at the College and the working conditions of graduate students.

“[The two deans] were incredibly responsive to faculty concern,” she said. “They listened very carefully to what we had to say.”

Summer A. Shafer, president of the Graduate Student Council and doctoral candidate in American Studies, said during an interview that smaller sections would help to relieve the burden placed on teaching fellows, who, according to a recent survey by the Graduate Student Council, are overworked.

“There’s a sense of doing more work than we are getting paid to do,” Shafer said, adding that TFs should dedicate seven hours a week to each section but that they work significantly more hours in reality.

Shafer added that smaller sections would also help alleviate the current shortage of teaching opportunities, which has prompted some graduate students to seek teaching opportunities at nearby institutions like MIT.

—Staff Writer Zara Zhang can be reached at zara.zhang@thecrimson.com. Follow her on Twitter at @zarazhangrui.