Undergraduate Instruction?

To the Editors of The Crimson:

The photograph on the front page of your Friday, January 27 paper, which I have just received has in combination with a visit with my son over the weekend between semesters provoked this letter. I am so thoroughly disgusted with the treatment he has received at the hands of many of Harvard's "section leaders" that I must speak out. Since your picture provides some documentation, may I use it as a point of departure and raise a few questions.

To take but one example, in his freshman year my son took a moral reasoning class from one of the distinguished senior Harvard faculty members, but the first hand instruction came from a sections leader who repeatedly came to meet his students with. "Well, I don't know what the professors thinks about Mill, etc., but here's my feeling." What followed was usually rambling nonsense, impression all right, rather than considered thinking. This disoriented and unprepared young man graded two papers and two examinations in that class, and my son spotted him one and one half hours before the final in the Greenhouse Cafe just beginning to work in his coffee and a stack of term papers at least twelve inches high. They had to be returned within a few hours. Anyone who watched this grader whip through several ten page papers at the rate of two to five minutes each would have wondered, "Why bother?" Like the person in your photograph this "instructor" did his work in circumstances marked by the distraction of excited talk and loud laughter and disruptive groans, punctuated by the clatter of dishes. I suppose those of us who pay $15,000 a year for a Harvard undergraduate degree can at least be glad that the Greenhouse Cafe is both without the video machines in Tommy's Lunch and its local patrons.

Were those papers in that class in ethics and justice graded properly, fairly? Hardly. But then you should have seen this section leader in class on the day before. Thanksgiving when I myself was a visitor. He passed out a Xerox copy of a hand-scratched assignment sheet. It had only two topics on it, and the section leader asked that everyone choose the second one. There was a general sigh among the students as they listened in this pathetic effort to make the second paper respectable. When asked in front of the hemmed and unconcerned professor when the paper was due, the graduate student actually could not say. Coordination, organization?--not to worry about such basic matters. When I saw the jumbled wording of the sentences on that topic sheet, the redundancy and incoherence masquerading under the thin guise of high ideas, even the misspelled, I was shocked. But I have since learned from looking at a number of such assignment sheets written by section leaders that disorder is the rule rather than the exception in these circumstances at Harvard.

In another year-long sophomore course my son was subjected to a graduate student who ran the whole course, evidently without the least bit of supervision. Only once during the first semester did this woman trouble herself with writing out paper assignments. And when they were written out, they followed the format I have just described. This graduate student liked to deliver paper topics orally, always at the last minute, so that she had plenty of opportunity to complain afterwards about how the students "really didn't do the assignment" or "focus" in their writing. Of course no one "really" knew what the assignment was, least of all her--until she had read the paper. The students in that "section" constantly believed that they were being set up to be knocked down, penalized for the lazy, scatter-brained behavior of the instructor.

Along with other graduate students who control such classes as this one, this woman constantly changed the rounding lists, constantly made time-consuming errors in bibliographical listings constantly made written assignments on reading that had been read for discussions of the week before. Thus students had to double read for the purposes of the belated paper assignment. Oh yes, duplicated effort was part of the plan why--ahem, ahem--whenever has it hurt a student to read his material twice? Better yet, why read it, just throw a little bull and wait to find out what you really have to study. When questioned these insecure graduate students can always justify, endlessly nationalize, manufacture new faults, and take personal offense. They seem to think that if they have you over to their dingy apartment once a semester for wine and cheese and, if everyone calls each other by first names, all is well.

What is wrong with Harvard? Can't the University afford some sort of office or room in which a graduate student can meet his students or sit and read student papers? Do undergraduate students have to put up with that studied immaturity and cultivated casualness of those graduate instructors who even hold office hours in some noisy, greasy cafe? How can substantive question be discussed in such places, or how can bluebooks be graded with much concentration in them? What about ordinary professionalism instead of the attitudinizing of these sidewalk-sale Dr. Johnsons?

Stories about the gods and goddesses who collect full salaries abound and for the most part I understand that they must be left to their mountain-top citadels. But the graduate students who are made to preside over so much of the undergraduate education at Harvard ought to be asked by responsible academic administrators to reform. Many are perhaps competent. But how can we tell unless they take the time to plan their work carefully; unless they read the material they teach with intelligence, so that they themselves can contribute something, instead of pushing off their work onto students most of the time; and unless they grade papers and examinations with a deliberation uninterrupted by the commerce of Cambridge merchants and their own eccentricities? A. Harvard Parent.