Teaching at Harvard

It certainly comes as no surprise to learn that the Overseers' Committee to study Harvard's teaching fellow program has uncovered "a considerable amount of uninspired, inexperienced, and weak teaching." Any one who has read the CRIMSON's Confidential Guide over the years, or talked to undergraduates, knows that poor teaching is the biggest complaint students have about the College.

For this reason Dean Ford's feeling that the committee got an unbalanced view of the teaching fellow program is open to question. Had the Overseers spent a week visiting sections and talking to students-instead of one day-they might have been even more appalled than they were at the number of incompetent teaching fellows in both departmental and General Education courses.

This situation is not solely the fault of the teaching fellows. Graduate students who wish to teach must squeeze in pedagogical duties between the demands of their own courses, the pressure of a thesis, worries about future employment, and often, the cares of a new family. No wonder many of them much prefer hefty fellowships which relieve them of the need to teach. And no wonder both the graduate students and the departments concerned often regard teaching fellowships as a supplementary form of financial aid.

The new long-term fellowship program adopted by the History, Government, and Economics Departments will help a little, by encouraging more of the best graduate students to teach, and by rearranging their programs to give them more time to do so. But this plan suffers from the same narrowness as the Committee's recommendations to raise salaries and appoint an Assistant Dean of Teaching Fellows. It will do no good to create financial inducements for graduate students to teach when the whole structure of academic values at Harvard argues against taking classroom chores seriously.

The bad teaching that the Overseers Committee pointed to in the teaching fellow program exists, in differing degrees, throughout the Faculty, and the inattention of some senior Faculty members to the performance of section men is only a symptom of a much more serious attention to teaching as a whole. As the report pointed out, the quality of teaching fellows varies greatly from department to department; it varies even more, however, from course to course. Professors who take their own teaching seriously tend to demand similar devotion from their teaching fellows, while those who regard time spent in the classroom as distasteful or unimportant are unlikely to require rigid standards in their assistants.

The problem of making Faculty members aware of their responsibilities as teachers is nothing new, but it has become even more pressing in recent years. A profusion of government and foundation research grants, especially in the sciences; the creation, at many universities, of prestigious professorships which require little or no teaching; the increasing availability of sabbaticals and leaves at other campuses-all these take Faculty members out of the classroom and reinforce the belief that, both before and after tenure, it is research, not teaching, that counts.

No single program at Harvard or elsewhere can redress a balance between scholarship and pedagogy that has long been missing. But a start should be made at many levels. Individual Faculty members can demand excellence in teaching, in themselves and in course assistants equally. Departments can watch their teaching fellows-and their instructors and assistant professors-closely, and let them know that teaching ability will count heavily in recommendations for advancement. Finally, the Corporation can make enthusiasm for, and ability in, teaching a firm prerequisite for appointment to the tenured ranks.

Such an effort does not have the simplicity of a campaign to "get tough" on the teaching fellows, nor is it likely to produce quick, dramatic results. It goes without saying that section men should be supervised more closely, and that incompetent teaching fellows should not be rehired. But these administrative reforms are of limited value. The real answer to poor instruction by teaching fellows is not higher pay and more control; it is, rather, to reaffirm the value of and the regard for teaching, at all levels of the Faculty, as central to the purposes of a university.