Enough Education for All?

In this year's Information about Radcliffe College for prospective students there appears a picture of a student and instructor with the caption: "Individual attention from professors is a hallmark of a Harvard-Radcliffe education."

The statement must sound like a broken promise to many upperclassmen, who came to Harvard and Radcliffe seeking the touted individualized instruction and instead found themselves lost in the crowd--a crowd which seems to be ever growing larger.

The situation has at least some of its roots in the recurring riddle of how to increase the number of women attending Harvard without reducing the number of men.

Maintaining the size of the College has consistently been the item traded off in favor of equalizing sex ratios. Comments made by administrators and members of the Strauch Committee, which is considering male and female admissions in preparation for next spring's merger negotiations, indicate that this is again likely to be the case: estimates of the possible increase range from 5 to 10 per cent.

Most students perceive that expansion of the College could only have depressing effects on that availability of educational resources at Harvard. It is easy to see how they come to that observation: already the College--or, at least, some departments--seems to be operating on the margin. This semester, for instance, several History concentrators were denied junior tutorial--supposedly one of the most valuable educational experiences to be had here--for no other reason than lack of resources.

Almost every student has his or her horror story--such as the 15-person sophomore tutorial in East Asian Studies last year--or tale of woe--the Freshman Seminar/-concentration/course-not-gotten-into series of tearjerkers--to tell. The prospect of even a 5 per cent increase in undergraduate enrollment does little to cheer them.

Students' perceptions are not exactly irrational. Since 1970, undergraduate enrollment has increased by approximately 300--the same number of students which would be added if an additional 5 per cent increase were sought--while teaching fellow fifths (the amount of teaching time) and number of graduate students in residence have both dropped--the former by 50 units or 4 per cent, the latter by about 230, 9 per cent.

Furthermore, Burton S. Dreben, dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, has said he anticipates an additional 10 per cent decrease in the number of graduate students in residence, to bring the total level down to between 2100 and 2200, the maximum number of students the GSAS says it can afford.

Clearly, the effect on educational resources under the projected circumstances--an expanding undergraduate body, a contracting pool of graduate student instructors--will be to put a squeeze on those resources.

Various proposals for alleviating the squeeze have been made, including a tri-mester system under which students are required to spend one to two fall or spring terms away from the school and at least one summer term in residence. Administratively, this would be a relatively simple solution, involving expansion of the already well-established summer school. However, most administrators and faculty members dislike the idea of making the summer term mandatory. "The pace of life in Cambridge for both students and faculty is much faster than many other places. The summer is an important respite," Robert J. Kiely, dean of Undergraduate Education, notes.

Another proposal is to expand opportunities for study away from Harvard. However, the small number of students who have petitioned to receive credit for work done out of residence--only 32 last year--seems to indicate that there would hardly be a groundswell of support for any mandatory program. Some students actually have taken less credit than they were awarded so that they would not lose a term in residence, according to John R. Marquand, senior tutor of Dudley House.

A third proposal which is discussed is the three-year A.B. However, discussion is bound not to be too serious while three-fourths of all Advanced Standing students elect to stay a fourth year. The number of students graduating after three years has risen each year for the past three years, but this fact is difficult to interpret. David Harnett, director of Advanced Standing, attributes the rise to termination of the draft; the increase could also be due to the desire of students to reduce the cost of schooling, or to a desire to begin professional training as soon as possible. At any rate, the factors that possibly account for the rise are so liable to fluctuation as to make this option difficult to assess.

As for further options, "No one is talking about enlarging the faculty during the present economic situation," Kiely points out.

As bad as all this may sound, it is nothing compared to the overcrowding which occurred in the years immediately following World War II, and continued into the Fifties, when the war group had graduated and a more normal distribution of students prevailed.

The size of the student body has changed very little over the past 25 years: there has only been a 14 per cent increase. What has changed dramatically over the same span of years is the size of the Faculty: an increase of over 100 per cent. Yet in the 1950s, students were far more likely to receive their instruction from faculty--mostly junior faculty--whereas today the same instruction is given by graduate students. Where have all the faculty gone?

Many of them have gone into fields where there are relatively few undergraduates. "There is an appearance of more growth in the faculty than is real" in terms of resources for undergraduates, Dean Rosovsky explains. He mentions in his letter to the Faculty the fact that the number of departments and degreegranting committees has grown from 41 in 1944 to 54 in 1974. A comparison of catalogues from each of those years reveals that a major source of the kind of apparent growth Rosovsky talks about is in the addition of "labor-intensive" departments. An example is Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations which requires a large number of instructors to cover all the subdisciplines in the field--and which draws comparatively few students.

Another source of apparent growth is the number of endowed chairs in fields which are primarily of interest to graduate students.

The other places are the field and into the laboratory. Many trace the demise of teaching and the displacement of faculty instruction by graduate student teaching to the "Plush Sixties" when millions of dollars in government funds became available for basic research. Whether the preference for conducting research was motivated by need to establish grounds for tenure or desire to do work in one's own specialty, scholars were offered the resources to indulge themselves.

At the same time, new funds became available for teacher training and graduate fellowships, facilitating the increase in the GSAS during the 1960s to its high of 2827 in 1966-67. One of the supposed benefits of Harvard's graduate school is the opportunity it provides for students to teach. The influx of willing teaching fellows in the 1960s coincided with faculty members' desire to spend more time on research.

When government funds were sharply cut back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, requiring the GSAS to cut student enrollment, many faculty were simply "out of the habit" of conducting sections and tutorials, as Kiely points out.

"The use of graduate students for so many kinds of teaching was itself an exception to Harvard tradition," Kiely said. "If anything, the decrease in the GSAS's enrollment will force a good thing."

Other administrators echo this sentiment. Rosovsky claims that the decline in the number of graduate students will free faculty teaching resources, and defines the most basic problem facing the College as the redirection of these resources back to undergraduates.

Dean Whitlock recalls that in the 1950s students felt there was much more student-faculty contact than today, when the ratio is nearly twice as favorable. "If nothing changes, then we won't have enough teaching resources," Whitlock says, adding that what is needed is a "redistribution of workloads."

Rosovsky claims that "the number of students is not really related to the quality of education." He may be right, but it is expansion of that number which is forcing--at last--the issue of the quality of undergraduate education.

This is the second part of a series on Harvard's possible expansion.