Staggering Section Sizes

If you've been at Harvard for any significant length of time, you've unfortunately been through the drill. You enroll in a large Core or departmental course, find your name among dozens of other students on the section list and appear at the appointed hour in Sever Hall. Maybe you're a little late, and so when you open the door to the room, you see that not only are all the seats at the small table occupied, but the free-standing desks are full. People are sitting on the floor.

As the section wends its way through the hour, it's all you can do to get one comment in edgewise, between sitting on the floor and trying to interject insights along with the 19 other people. You leave after 53 minutes drained, tired and much less excited about the subject than you were in lecture that morning or after preparing for section the night before.

After three years of sitting through such mammoth sections, where "discussion" consists of little more than a graduate student playing traffic cop among the sea of raised hands, I am outraged that Harvard has not done more to reduce section size.

No section at Harvard is supposed to have more than 20 people in it, according to Dean of the Faculty Jeremy R. Knowles. He acknowledges that "undergraduate migration" from one section to another because of better times or better teaching fellows does occur. However, the average should be 20 students per section for social science and humanities lecture courses, said Assistant Dean of Undergraduate Education Jeffrey Wolcowitz, with smaller maximums for lab science, language and quantitative methods courses. In other words, if a History Department lecture course has 40 people, it will be allotted money for two sections.

But a cap of 20 students per section -- which all too often becomes a norm of 20 students per section -- is a ridiculous number in the first place. As Knowles himself declared in an interview with Harvard Magazine last spring, "I should much rather have a discussion for 55 minutes with 12 people than with 20." For one thing, 12 people can actually fit around one of those tables in Sever.

A section of 20 is more properly termed an entire class, and one of 25, like the section one history TF I know has this semester, is an entire lecture. I know that the Faculty of Arts and Sciences has recently carved itself out of a significant budget deficit, and I know that Harvard is undergoing a capital campaign because it needs money, but there are few things more important than the contact students have with someone who actually knows their names and grades their papers.

Tuition at my private high school ran about $10,000 per year and gave us classes of between 12 and 15 people; tuition at Harvard is twice that, and yet we're given sections with one-third to two-thirds more students. It makes one wonder where the money goes.

Of course, there are fiscal problems in reducing section size. If the cap for the social sciences and humanities lecture courses were 12, that would increase by nearly 70 percent the number of sections needed for those courses, which would in turn increase the amount of money needed to pay graduate students teaching those sections. But it could be done.

The funds for sections come out of FAS general operating unrestricted monies, Wolcowitz said, and to make sections smaller, FAS could increase its overall budget, redirect funds currently used for other purposes or decide that certain types of courses should not have sections at all.

I don't know enough about the intricacies of the FAS operating budget to determine where the money should come from, and I don't really care. The administration must make a commitment to a smaller number of students in each humanities and social science lecture course section, and stick with it.

Thus far, it has been Dean Knowles' crusade, but only on paper. I issue a challenge to the dean to make good on his assertion to Harvard Magazine that "the immediate resource issue is maintaining pressure on making section sizes smaller." Mandate that all sections contain between 12 and 15 people. Without such a commitment, the word might start getting out that Harvard students are "learning" in "sections" of 25 people -- and the result could make this year's U.S. News ranking seem positively cheerful.

Sarah J. Schaffer's column appears on alternate Fridays.