MEMORANDUM

TO: President Bok and Dean Whitla, on the "College Life Questionnaire"

FROM: Susan B. Glasser

I received your communication of 28 March and decided to respond before the public forum you announced for "later in the spring." My preliminary findings indicate that you were right in saying "this questionnaire will take some time." I spent an hour-and-a-half responding to your questions. That's alot of time out of a busy day in the life of a Harvard sophomore.

If my "undergraduate experience" has confirmed anything, it has reinforced my skepticism about the worth accorded to student input. This University fires the professors we acclaim. It has institutional policies often in direct opposition to those favored by a vast majority of students. Top administrators rarely, if ever, meet undergraduates. Faculty members in large lecture courses have never met most of the students enrolled in the class. The list goes on...

So, I wasn't inclined to see the worth of your questionnaire. But since I took the time to fill it out--something that other undergraduates may not have the time to do--I have included some of my responses, along with findings from my own unscientific study of several other undergraduates:

. First, a procedural question: who wrote this thing? Were there students on the committee that came up with the questions? It certainly doesn't seem so, because many of the questions are unanswerable simply because they are not relevant. The two questions that were suggested by the Undergraduate Council--on a student center and exams before Christmas--were important ones.

. What if all of the questions had benefited from similar input? One question, in particular, grated: "Have I ever gone to my House Master about a serious personal difficulty?" Come on, I've only shaken his hand once. On a more technical level, does that mean my House master should get a "5" for unhelpfulness, or a "non-applicable" since I've never approached him?

. Making the House system the focus of the survey biases the outcome. The questionnaire assumes that the Houses do play a central role in the lives of undergraduates. Since they don't for the majority of students, many of the questions won't provide information about the real undergraduate experience. For example, there are two choices under "where do you study?": the House or your room. Since my room is in my House, which do I put? What if I study somewhere else, or nowhere at all?

. The adjectives used to describe the Houses promote stereotypes and are insufficient to convey the variety of experiences people have in their house. Winthrop residents would probably have preferred "crowded" to any other description of their three-year home by the Charles. But it wasn't on the list. Also, isn't an athlete likely to describe his House as "athletic," or an artist as "artistic," no matter what other people think? Finally, who knows whether a certain House is "civilized" or "distinctive" or "stimulating"? I don't, and so I didn't check those descriptions.

. There are no questions about time commitment or level of involvement with extracurriculars and academic work. Since lack of time is an endemic Harvard disease, how can you omit this aspect of our undergraduate experience from a survey that purports to examine "college life"? There are questions ad nauseum about house life, house community, house committees and house masters. But if no substantial house life actually exists, then the survey's questions won't be worth a farthing. In the survey, I put my extracurriculars at the top of my list of "meaningful" Harvard experiences.

. Questions I couldn't figure out: "What is my religion?" Does that mean what is my religious background or what do I believe in or both? What if I believe in several different things or none at all? "House's architechtural style"? This is one of the choices under the section about why you chose your House. Is this referring to the I-hate-Mather-because-it-is-ugly school of thought or does it mean a preference for large rooms?

. Questions I couldn't figure out, Part Two: This one is perhaps the strangest question in the entire 18-page booklet: "Please assess the contribution of each of the following to the development of your sense of social responsibility and contribution to society." A variety of choices, including "House experience," are listed. Who says Harvard students necessarily have a "sense of social responsibilty"? Who would say that the "House experience" promotes this kind of responsibility? And why is this on a survey about College life? Strange...

. What effect will student reponses to the survey have? The questionnaire asks our opinion about several important campus issues, including the timing of fall semester exams and the creation of a student center. What would you do if the survey found a large majority advocating a student center? Or a pre-Christmas exam schedule? I doubt you will ever change the exam calendar simply because 99 percent of students want it that way. And what about the section asking for students to come up with ways of improving student/faculty contact? Who will read those responses? What will happen to the ideas? Most likely they will land in the large dump that constitutes "student input" at the College. The results of the survey are scheduled for discussion at a public forum later this semester. Fine, but then what?

THESE criticisms are not meant to imply that the survey is worthless--statistics are a valuable, if unreliable, measure of student opinion. But as any undergraduate can attest, students and their lives are not reducible to numbers or measurement. A survey on the quality of College life can only begin to assess the qualitative problems they face.

The house system, as I have learned by filling out this survey, is singularly unsuccessful. But even if the overall survey results agree with my conclusion, what will be done about it? My guess is: Not much.